advanced searching or sorting through jumbled data

AleinPump

New Member
Joined
Aug 30, 2018
Messages
2
Hi team,

I am jammed with a situation and I was hoping that somebody can help me out.

I gave a team a sheet to fill out, where they had to copy a row with 3 categories, located in 3 columns, and asked them to copy+paste those 3 categories next to the other input I was requesting.
Unfortunately, most pasted all kinds of versions of those 3 columns jumbled into 1 cell only, for the most part by combining the categories in different ways. Some used tabs as text (not sure if Excel sees those as tabs or a bunch of spaces), others used the ">" character, some used "/"'s and " "'s...

Essentially I am trying to find a way to count how many times the combination A2, B2, and C3 was used in column E:

ABCDE
1​
Cat 1Cat 2Cat 3examples of jumbled input
2​
blah 1qwerty 1asdf 1blah 1qwerty 1asdf 1
3​
blah 2qwerty 2asdf 2blah 2qwerty 2asdf 2
4​
blah 3qwerty 3asdf 3blah 3qwerty 3asdf 3
5​
blah 4qwerty 4asdf 4blah 4qwerty 4asdf 4
6​
blah 5qwerty 5asdf 5blah 5qwerty 5asdf 5
7​
blah 6qwerty 6asdf 6blah 6>qwerty 6>asdf 6
8​
blah 7qwerty 7asdf 7blah 7>qwerty 7>asdf 7
9​
blah 8qwerty 8asdf 8blah 8>qwerty 8>asdf 8
10​
blah 9qwerty 9asdf 9blah 9>qwerty 9>asdf 9
11​
blah 10qwerty 10asdf 10blah 10>qwerty 10>asdf 10
12​
blah 11qwerty 11asdf 11blah 11/qwerty 11/asdf 11
13​
blah 12qwerty 12asdf 12blah 12/qwerty 12/asdf 12
14​
blah 13qwerty 13asdf 13blah 13/qwerty 13/asdf 13
15​
blah 14qwerty 14asdf 14blah 14/qwerty 14/asdf 14
16​
blah 15qwerty 15asdf 15blah 15/qwerty 15/asdf 15
17​
blah 16qwerty 16asdf 16blah 16 qwerty 16 asdf 16
18​
blah 17qwerty 17asdf 17blah 17 qwerty 17 asdf 17
19​
blah 18qwerty 18asdf 18blah 18 qwerty 18 asdf 18
20​
blah 19qwerty 19asdf 19blah 19 qwerty 19 asdf 19
21​
blah 20qwerty 20asdf 20blah 20 qwerty 20 asdf 20


Any advice as to how I can get a count on those categories, without having to manually fix everything in E line by line (got a few thousand lines of the input and around 300 categories in the ABC)?

Thanks very much in advance for the help!!
 

Excel Facts

What do {} around a formula in the formula bar mean?
{Formula} means the formula was entered using Ctrl+Shift+Enter signifying an old-style array formula.
Hi,​
in the Data menu use the Text To Columns feature …​
 
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