Google Spreadsheet, Count If Contains a String

It will likely have been solved by now, but I ran accross this and figured to give my input

=COUNTIF(a2:a51;"*iPad*")

The important thing is that separating parameters in google docs is using a ; and not a ,

In case someone is still looking for the answer, this worked for me:

=COUNTIF(A2:A51, "*" & B1 & "*")

B1 containing the iPad string.

You should use

=COUNTIF(A2:A51, "*iPad*")/COUNTA(A2:A51)

Additionally, if you wanted to count more than one element, like iPads OR Kindles, you would use

=SUM(COUNTIF(A2:A51, {"*iPad*", "*kindle*"}))/COUNTA(A2:A51)

in the numerator.

Try using wildcards directly in the COUNTIF function :

=(COUNTIF(A2:A51,"=*iPad*")/COUNTA(A2:A51))*1

Wildcards worked for me when the string I was searching for could be entered manually. However, I wanted to store this string in another cell and refer to it. I couldn't figure out how to do this with wildcards so I ended up doing the following:

A1 is the cell containing my search string. B and C are the columns within which I want to count the number of instances of A1, including within strings:

=COUNTIF(ARRAYFORMULA(ISNUMBER(SEARCH(A1, B:C))), TRUE)

I had similar problem however the various count solutions still wouldn't work even with wildcards of "*"& etc..... My problem was caused by &nbsb (hidden spaces) which is hidden in the background when copying eg data from a webpage. This prevents the find from working properly. Use:

 =TRIM(SUBSTITUTE(A2, CHAR(160), " ")) 

or

 =TRIM(SUBSTITUTE(A2,CHAR(160),CHAR(32))) 

or similar to get rid of them.