title: using COUNTIF with blank value criteria with variable ranges
body: <p>I have sort of a bizarre issue here attempting to use <code>COUNTIF</code>.</p>
  
  <p>pretend for a moment this is the sheet in question:</p>
  
  <pre><code>A        B
  John     Doe
  John     Smith
  John
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The last value there (B3) is an empty field.</p>
  
  <p>The intended <code>COUNTIF</code> formula should count the number of empty values in the <code>B</code> column only IF John is present in the A column.</p>
  
  <p>The only way I have been able to do this successfully is explicitly specifying the range to be counted (<code>B1:B3</code>), but this formula is going to be doing this on multiple sheets that do not all have the same number of rows, therefore, I cannot use <code>COUNTBLANK</code> because it is returning staggeringly high results if I simply name the <code>B</code> column a name and specify the name as the range.</p>
  
  <hr>
  
  <p>EDIT:</p>
  
  <p>So apparently countif cannot be used for that? A workaround I have found is using <code>SUMPRODUCT</code>. Is this the best way to go about doing this?</p>
  
  <p><code>=SUMPRODUCT((September!K1:K16000="John")*(September!L1:L16000=""))</code></p>