count distinct values in spreadsheet

Question

I have a Google spreadsheet with a column that looks like this:

City ---- London Paris London Berlin Rome Paris 

I want to count the appearances of each distinct city (so I need the city name and the number of appearances).

City   | Count -------+------ London |  2 Paris  |  2 Berlin |  1 Rome   |  1 

How do I do that?

Answer 1

Link to Working Examples

Solution 0

This can be accompished using pivot tables.

Solution 1

Use the unique formula to get all the distinct values. Then use countif to get the count of each value. See the working example link at the top to see exactly how this is implemented.

Unique Values        Count =UNIQUE(A3:A8)       =COUNTIF(A3:A8;B3)                      =COUNTIF(A3:A8;B4)                      ... 

Solution 2

If you setup your data as such:

City     ----     London   1 Paris    1 London   1 Berlin   1 Rome     1 Paris    1 

Then the following will produce the desired result.

=sort(transpose(query(A3:B8,"Select sum(B) pivot (A)")),2,FALSE) 

I'm sure there is a way to get rid of the second column since all values will be 1. Not an ideal solution in my opinion.

via http://googledocsforlife.blogspot.com/2011/12/counting-unique-values-of-data-set.html

Other Possibly Helpful Links

• http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/docs/a5qFC4pFZJ8

Answer 2

You can use the query function, so if your data were in col A where the first row was the column title...

=query(A2:A,"select A, count(A) where A != '' group by A order by count(A) desc label A 'City'", 0) 

yields

City    count  London  2 Paris   2 Berlin  1 Rome    1 

Link to working Google Sheet.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1N5xw8-YP2GEPYOaRkX8iRA6DoeRXI86OkfuYxwXUCbc/edit#gid=0