Counting the incidence of a name

In OpenOffice spreadsheet, suppose I want to count how many times a name appears, I found that one can use the countif function with the following syntax:

=countif( <range of cells to look at>;"="&<pattern>)

can be

"Name"
or
a cell such as
F65.

Caveat: This function is very strict with pattern matching. A space at the end of the name will result in no match so be careful.