If ever find yourself needing to find how many times each a specific item appears in a list (say of domain names that your email newsletter subscribers are subscribed from, or zip codes your registered users hail from), there’s an easy way to do that using Excel. All you need to do is sort the list by the column you want to count. Then use the advanced filter to create a copy of unqiue entries in a new column. Then use the Countif function in a third column to compare the other two columns. Here’s the formua, assuming you’re comparing columns A and B and that you have 50 items in the original column: =Countif(A$1:A$50,B1) Paste the formula into column C adjacent to each of the items in column B. That’s all there is to it. For a much more detailed explanation (with screen shots and everything), check out Counting items in an Excel list on TechRepublic.com.
Tags: Excel
A great site that breaks data down in a bunch of interesting ways is IBM’s Many Eyes at http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/. The word tree, while it doesn’t give you an exact count, is particularly useful in breaking down text.
Great site – visualizations are very cool. Will have to add this to my list of things to play around with this weekend!