COUNTIF formula with multiple criteria and table

Question

I have a list of four developers (A1="Dev1", A2="Dev2", A3="Dev3" and A4="Dev3").

Within a working week calendar, I have 5 columns, one for each day of the week (C1="Monday", D1="Tuesday", E1="Wednesday", F1="Thursday, G1="Friday").

If developer Dev3 has a day off on Tuesday, I'd go to D2 and input: "Dev3".

On H2, I have the following formula:

=COUNTIF(C2:G2,"*Dev1*")+COUNTIF(C2:G2,"*Dev2*")+COUNTIF(C2:G2,"*Dev3*")+COUNTIF(C2:G2,"*Dev4*")

In the scenario above, I'd have the value of H2 being '1'. If I edit D2 cell to something like this: "Dev3,Dev4", the result of H2 would be '2'.

This formula works well for what I need but I know that there is a more elegant way that I could use the list of the developers on A:A column, instead of creating a single COUNTIF element per developer.

Could anyone help me achieving the usage of the list A:A instead of creating a single COUNTIF element for every single developer, instead?

sheet's screenshot:

Answer 1

Either a SUM / COUNTIF function array¹ formula or a SUMPRODUCT function should be able to count correctly providing there are no 'false positives' like Dev1 found in Dev12 .

'array formula
=SUM(COUNTIF(C2:G2, "*"&A$1:INDEX(A:A, MATCH("zzz",A:A ))&"*"))
'SUMPRODUCT
=SUMPRODUCT(--ISNUMBER(SEARCH(A$1:INDEX(A:A, MATCH("zzz",A:A )), C2:G2)))

Note that in both cases, the list of developers from column A has been cut down to the minimum number of cells with,

A$1:INDEX(A:A, MATCH("zzz",A:A ))

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¹ _{Array formulas need to be finalized with Ctrl + Shift + Enter↵ . Once entered into the first cell correctly, they can be filled or copied down or right just like any other formula. Try and reduce your full-column references to ranges more closely representing the extents of your actual data. Array formulas chew up calculation cycles logarithmically so it is good practise to narrow the referenced ranges to a minimum. See Guidelines and examples of array formulas for more information.}