Counting number of occurrences of cell with alphanumeric characters in a range

In F1 I have an alphanumeric entry - ABC123.
In range O6:O1005 I have results of a VLOOKUP from another worksheet. Hopefully all those match entry in F1.
To verify that using variations of =COUNTIF(O6:O1005,"="&F1) formula, however even when at least one in range O6:O1005 is a match to F1 - this formula returns zero.

Yep, that's the ticket - it did look like extra spaces were causing the issue

Trying to use <> version, but how do I get it to ignore cells that are blank but not empty (i.e. cells with formulas)?

=SUMPRODUCT(--(TRIM(O6:O1005)<>TRIM(F1)))