Is this a one-time-only analysis, that is once you have your counts, you won't be updating the base data? Or is it an interactive list where you will be adding additional post codes to the list and need to keep running totals?

In the first case, it would be simple enough to just reformat the data, getting rid of the RM and the last four characters leaving you with just a list of one and two digit numbers, you could sort them, and then do a simple count of each group of the same number.

I suspect you would have already done this if it were a one-time task. For an interactive list... I ran into the same CountIf difficulties you did. No doubt there is a way to do it, but it will need more excel-fu than I can provide.

tanstaafl.