Why isn't my TBA formula working in Numbers?

Create a second copy of that formula with it specifying a smaller number of cells, change the ones it checks until you find the specific cell, and then check it carefully, including a formula if it uses one.

(259805)

By default, wildcard searches are case insensitive, so it could be triggering on the letters 'tba' embed in any other word in the specified range - for example, 'Basketball'

Without seeing the entire range, it's hard to be sure, but you can use Numbers' Find & Replace to look for occurrences of 'tba' anywhere on the sheet.

What you really want is a check for the word 'TBA', rather than those three letters anywhere in the text.

For that, you'll need to step up to a regular expression which is kind of like a programmatic way of defining your search term.

You need to replace your "*TBA*" in your formula with:

REGEX(\bTBA\b",1)

It looks weird, but the \b indicates a word boundary, so this looks for 'TBA' as a word on its own, not embedded in another word like 'Basketball". The ,1 at the end tells Numbers to match case-sensitive (you can use ,0 for case-insensitive to match 'tba' if you want.

So, that said, your formula should look like:

=IF(OR(COUNTIF(A2:Q7,REGEX("\bTBA\b",1))>0,COUNTIF(A12:Q18,REGEX("\bTBA\b",1))>0),"ORANGE CELL = CLIENT TO PROVIDE MISSING INFORMATION","")