Excel Help

[VeNT]

Hey guys
my google Fu appears to be weak as I can't find a way to do this
I've a spreadsheet with a list of users and errors
it looks like this

[USER][Department][Error][Date]
User1 Department1 error 1 21/11/10
User2 Department2 error 1 21/11/10
User1 Department1 error 3 17/12/10
User3 Department3 error 2 19/01/11

I want to get excel to pull the number of times a user has had an error so I get an Ouput of
User1 Department1 [error #]

this list is updated constantly but I can't find anything that will give me a output like this!
I can use the Excel shortcut for counting data but that requires me to update the whole sheet every time I want to check (ie remove the prev formatting, re apply it) so I'd rather have something that just worked
someone said I could use a pivot table but I've 0 exp of those and not sure where to start?

can you guys help?

[edit]
Tried
COUNTIF($B$2:$B$65101, "*"&B2&"*")
but that falls over sometimes (gave me two different results for the same user)

 

[dazzerd]

I;m not sure you are explaining what you actually want to achieive here. If you just want to know how many erros each use has then just use countif.

If you want to know how many users have had certain types of errors then you can use sum product or an array. If your data set is too large then simply concatinate the user and error column. Then create a cross table and do a count if from that.

error2errorerrorerror
Users1
Users
users
Users
users
Users

Then in each cell do countif(range(this would be the concatinated column),$A2&A$1) then copy into the cells of the table.

This would tell you that user 1 had had x amount of error2 for example.

Helfpul if you could post an example and the exact result you want to achieve.