Irene,
By the word "tick", I'm not sure which character you are using, but the
following formula is for the grave accent (`), which is generally on the
same key with the tilde (~) symbol.
=COUNTIF(A1:A10,"`")
You probably don't want to use characters like the apostrophe (') or the
dash (-) or the slash (/) because of the special way Excel treats those
characters.