Count tickets on more than one condition at once
COUNTIF answers one question about one column. A real queue asks about two or three columns together.
Task:
You run the support queue for a small SaaS product. Nine tickets came in today, each logged with its agent, priority and current status. In B11 count how many High-priority tickets are still open across the whole queue. In B12 count how many High-priority tickets Jordan personally has already resolved.
Learning Objectives:
- Count rows against two or more conditions at once with COUNTIFS
- Keep every criteria range aligned to the same rows as the others
- Add a third condition to an existing COUNTIFS without restructuring it
Solve without hints for +5 XP
Interactive Spreadsheet
The data in this exercise
This is the grid you start with. Cell references in the task — B6, C2 — point at the row numbers and column letters below.
| A | B | C | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Agent | Priority | Status |
| 2 | Jordan | High | Resolved |
| 3 | Priya | Low | Resolved |
| 4 | Jordan | High | Open |
| 5 | Priya | High | Resolved |
| 6 | Jordan | Medium | Resolved |
| 7 | Priya | High | Open |
| 8 | Jordan | High | Resolved |
| 9 | Priya | Medium | Resolved |
| 10 | Jordan | High | Open |
| 11 | High-priority tickets still open | ||
| 12 | High-priority tickets Jordan has resolved |
What this exercise teaches (contains the answer)
COUNTIFS only counts a row once every condition passed to it is true for that row, which is why each range has to run over the same rows as the others — line up B2:B10 against a differently-shifted span of C2:C10 and the formula stops describing one ticket and starts comparing rows that have nothing to do with each other. B12 answers a narrower question than B11 without any new mechanism: adding Jordan as a third range/condition pair narrows the same single pass rather than needing a separate step that first finds Jordan's tickets and then filters those. That is the difference between COUNTIFS and stacking COUNTIF calls — one evaluates every condition together, so going from two conditions to three costs one more pair, not a rewrite.