Count number of uniques starting with a given letter?

[MeatLightning]

Hi all -
I have a spreadsheet for my iTunes library (cols: Song Name, Artist,
Album, etc). I want to count the number of unique artists that start with a
given letter (A for example).

Note that each record is a Song - meaning I have a row for each song on an
album - the artist and album values stay the same while the Song Name
changes. For ex:

Col A ColB ColC
Song 1 Artist Album
Song 2 Artist Album
Song 3 Artist Album

As a result in order to count the number of artists in my collection, I
cannot simply count the number of entries in the Artist column (ColB in my
example above). I need to count the *unique* entries in the Artist column.
(I'm currently using this formula to do the artist count:
"SUMPRODUCT((B1:B100<>"")/COUNTIF(B1:B100,B1:B100&""))".)

So how can I now count the number of unique artists in my collection that
start with a given letter?

any help would be greatly appreciated!!!
- meat.

 

[Toppers]

Try:

=SUMPRODUCT((LEFT(B1:B100,1)="A" )/COUNTIF(B1:B100,B1:B100&""))

 

[MeatLightning]

sweet! that does it - thanks a bunch!

Try:

=SUMPRODUCT((LEFT(B1:B100,1)="A" )/COUNTIF(B1:B100,B1:B100&""))