Here is a problem that looks simple, a COUNTIFS formula, two criteria, a range of 49 cells, yet the answer is wrong. The user counted three values between 95 and 97, and Excel returned two. After tutorials and forum searches, the frustration is real, and it is also understandable. The issue here is not a bug or a limitation of Excel 2019. It is a quiet, common misunderstanding about how the software reads the numbers in your cells.
The screenshot shows a column of values, and the formula checks if each one is greater than or equal to 95 and less than or equal to 97. The user expects a clean count. But when a number like 96.5 appears, the human eye sees a single value and counts it as one. Excel, however, sees the stored decimal as a precise number, and that precision might not match what the formula's criteria expect. More often, the culprit is that some of those cells contain text that looks like a number, a leading apostrophe, a space, or a number stored as text from a data import. COUNTIFS treats text and numbers as different things. So a cell that displays "96" but is actually text will be invisible to the formula. The manual count sees three, but the formula only sees two numbers that are truly numeric.
This is a reminder that spreadsheets are precise tools, not intuitive ones. They do not guess what you mean. They execute exactly what you write. The user's instinct to consult YouTube and forums is good, but the next step is to check the data type, not the formula syntax. Select those cells and look at the formula bar. If you see a leading apostrophe, or if the cell is left-aligned when others are right-aligned, you have found the gap. A quick fix is to use the VALUE function or paste-special multiply by 1 to convert text to numbers. Another approach is to use SUMPRODUCT with a double unary minus, which forces Excel to treat text as zero, though that is a workaround, not a solution to the root cause.
The lesson here is practical and direct: before you blame the formula, inspect the data. COUNTIFS is not failing you. It is telling you that your data is not uniform. The real skill is not memorizing functions, but learning to see what Excel sees. Clean the data, and the formula will give you the answer you expect.