Column full of NAMES, how to return top 5 or 10?

[timleg]

I have a referral spreadsheet. In this spreadsheet I track our sources of leads. One type of source I track is very specific to peoples names, so we can thank that person. Anyway, I want to see the top five people in that column.

For example.
column A
tim
john
jerry
sally
sue
tim
sue
tim
john
george
sue

etc.

Some of those names appear more than once, as they have referred more leads to us.

So, WITHOUT doing a countif and then coming up with a number and then ranking, how can see who the top five people are? or top 10?

The reason for not doing the countif is because I'm doing that now and there are just so many names, I have to kind of eye ball who I see the most, set up a countif and then see that way. Is there a way to just see what names appear the most in a column?

 

[steve the fish]

Id use a pivot table. You would just need a header in there first.

 

[timleg]

I've never created a pivot table, how can I use that to display the top 5 or 10 names?

 

[timleg]

I figured it out, thanks!

 

[steve the fish]

Put a header in the column of names. Highlight the column. Press Insert tab then PivotTable. Select new worksheet or current worksheet then ok. You should now see the pivot table field list which will have just one field. Hover over that field and drag it to the Rows area. Repeat but drag to the Values area. Now go to the pivot. Right click in one of the numbers created and then sort largest to smallest. Right click now on the names themselves. Hover over filter. In the dialog box you see "Top 10". Click that. Adjust as necessary and thats it.