COUNTIF wild card trick with Excel

- Here's a really cool tip. So let's say you have a list like this and you want to count how many times red is someone's first choice. So not how many cells have the word red, but how many have it there in that first position. What we can do is a COUNTIF function with a twist. So first we highlight our range, AKA the list of everything that we're counting. And then for our criteria, we are going to start typing "red" in quotation marks because it is a string of text inside of a function. But before we put that closing quotation marks on, we are going to go in and put an asterisk. And what that means in the Excel world is a wild card, meaning that there will be one or more characters after the word red. And then we go in and close our quotation marks, and we have our counts of how many have red first.