title: Using COUNTIFS to count and also exclude multiple texts in a column
body: <p>I’d like to start by giving due credit to @skkakkar who helped me with a similar problem and offered some useful suggestions. </p>
  
  <p>What I’m trying to do is use the COUNTIFS function with the help of a criteria table, to count how many times Company3 E$:6$ occurs in A$:A$, then count how many times Full Time – Perm F$6$ occurs in B$:B$, then count all cells with text in C$:C$ but exclude all the ones that start with “Factory” and return a value.</p>
  
  <p>In the Attempt Table I tried to use the formula =COUNTIFS($A:$A,$E$6,$B:$B,$F$6,$C:$C,$G$6) which returns 6, because excel does not recognize “Factory” on its own.</p>
  
  <p>But when I input the full string “Factory - Tampa” in the formula =COUNTIFS($A:$A,$E$7,$B:$B,$F$7,$C:$C,$G$7), excel returns 5 because there are 5 other cells in C$:C$ that do not equal Factory – Tampa (close to what I’m looking for, but not quite).</p>
  
  <p>The problem is that the cells in C$:C$ that I want to exclude contain Factory - Tampa, Factory - Phoenix, which is more than 1 word.</p>
  
  <p>In the below screenshot I have given an example of the expected result from the criteria I want to count.</p>
  
  <p>A suggestion was to change all cells that have "Factory - something" to just Factory, but with rows that are 500+ long, that might not be efficient, and I would probably need another formula for that.</p>
  
  <p>Please let me know if you need more clarity. I appreciate your help in advance.</p>
  
  <p>Screen shot of Table:
  <a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/U8Eib.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/U8Eib.png" alt="Screenshot of Table"></a></p>