Count of non-numerical data?

[laurenmae]

Hello,

I am trying to find a way to save some time working in Excel. I have a spreadsheet which keeps track of my department's employees, the stories they've written for our website, and when the story was published. I'll be adding to this just about every day as new content is added to our site. I'd like to create a formula in Excel that will look at the column with the name of the employee and keep a running count of how many stories that employee has written. For example, the sheet might look like:

11/1/2009 | John Doe | Event Story
11/2/2009 | Jane Doe | News Story
11/2/2009 | John Doe | News Story

Then the cell with the formula would look to the second column (with the employee's name) and keep a running count. So John Doe's formula cell will read "2" right, now, but will update to 3 if I added a third story for him on the sheet.

I hope this is something that can be done - It seems like the sort of thing that Excel can do. I tried the Count formula but that doesn't work with names (as far as I can tell) and I tried pivot tables and the Conditional Sum wizard, but they won't refresh on their own, I'd have to re-do the steps every time I added more data. I've asked my co-workers and no one is quite sure - so they directed me here.

Your help would be so greatly appreciated! Thank you!

 

[Special-K99]

Pivot Tables?

 

[laurenmae]

Thanks, I thought of pivot tables, and I created a pivot table. But after adding some more data, when I checked the pivot table it did not update with the new info - just the data from when I created the table.

 

[Aladin Akyurek]

Hello,

I am trying to find a way to save some time working in Excel. I have a spreadsheet which keeps track of my department's employees, the stories they've written for our website, and when the story was published. I'll be adding to this just about every day as new content is added to our site. I'd like to create a formula in Excel that will look at the column with the name of the employee and keep a running count of how many stories that employee has written. For example, the sheet might look like:

11/1/2009 | John Doe | Event Story
11/2/2009 | Jane Doe | News Story
11/2/2009 | John Doe | News Story

Then the cell with the formula would look to the second column (with the employee's name) and keep a running count. So John Doe's formula cell will read "2" right, now, but will update to 3 if I added a third story for him on the sheet.

I hope this is something that can be done - It seems like the sort of thing that Excel can do. I tried the Count formula but that doesn't work with names (as far as I can tell) and I tried pivot tables and the Conditional Sum wizard, but they won't refresh on their own, I'd have to re-do the steps every time I added more data. I've asked my co-workers and no one is quite sure - so they directed me here.

Your help would be so greatly appreciated! Thank you!

Have a look at the COUNTIF function.

 

[c_m_s_jr]

Thanks, I thought of pivot tables, and I created a pivot table. But after adding some more data, when I checked the pivot table it did not update with the new info - just the data from when I created the table.

If you want to stick with the pivot table you could simply click the refresh button or you can add some simple VBA to refresh the pivot each time you click the worksheet that contains it.

 

[laurenmae]

Countif works! Thank you - such a simple solution, I knew it was out there somewhere.

Thanks for the pivot table suggestion too.