Perform an "OR" operation on a list of criteria within an if statement.

Hello everyone,

I have over 50,000 rows of defect data and I'm looking to sort them by month for a statistical analysis.

I want to count the number of defects in a given area (column H in the "Defects" sheet), perform a monthly count (date in column C of the "Defects" sheet), but only retrieve a specific type of defect (column J of the "Defects" sheet).

I'm using the following function, which solves the first part of my problem:

=COUNTIFS('Defects'!$H:$H,$B2,'Defects'!$C:$C,">=" & E$2,Defects'!$C:$C,"<" & E$3)

Basically, I check the date (the month is in the second row of my document) of my defect (first column B) and I check for each one if it falls between the first of the month (inclusive) and the first of the following month (exclusive).

I haven't found anything better... if you have any ideas to improve it, I'm all ears.

Otherwise, my problem is that this method retrieves all types of defects for each zone. Since the defect descriptions have changed several times over the past year, I've ended up with multiple descriptions for the same type of defect, and I don't want to include them all.

I've grouped all the descriptions into one column, but there are about fifteen of them. Is there a way to do something like this:

COUNTIF(DefectNames; OR(ListNameDefectNames))

? Basically, a function or a way to use "OR" without having to rewrite all the defect descriptions?

That's not very clear, I apologize.

Thank you in advance for your help!