Count number of times a term appears in an array of lists

Question

I have a question the count function. Lets say a have a single column of data coming in from a google form. Its going to have 3 data inputs coming in from each response of the form. The possible responses are from "A" to "Z", but each response can only be three of those choices. Ex.

A,B,N
B,C,Z
X,T,H
X,E,B
Y,W,J

Is there a function to count the number of times a said input appeared in the the column? To tell me the number of times an A appeared, a B appeared, a C and so on?

Answer 1

There are multiple ways, but the easiest is to use countif with wildcards:

=countif(A1:A, "*X*")

Here * matches any number of characters, so *X* matches any string containing X.