Count Occurrences in Excel (a value, a word, or a character)

How many times a value appears

=COUNTIF(A2:A100,"Pune")

Or point at a cell: =COUNTIF(A2:A100,D2). Not case-sensitive.

Cells that contain a word anywhere

=COUNTIF(A2:A100,"*refund*")

A count for every item

1. List each item once: =UNIQUE(A2:A100) in D2 (UNIQUE).
2. Next to it: =COUNTIF(A2:A100,D2#).

Or a pivot table with the field in Rows and Values.

How many times a character appears in one cell

=LEN(A2)-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(A2,",",""))

Counts the commas in A2: length before minus length after removing them.

How many times a word appears in one cell

=(LEN(A2)-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(A2,"tax","")))/LEN("tax")

SUBSTITUTE is case-sensitive; wrap A2 in LOWER() to ignore case.

Across a whole range

=SUMPRODUCT(LEN(A2:A100)-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(A2:A100,"x","")))

Related: find duplicates · count words