How do I count multiple repeating values in single column

[NerdMonster]

Hello,

Here's my first ever post. Thanks in advance for the help.

I'm in sales. I downloaded every transaction made for 2013. The final tally was 7442 transactions. There are 546 different sales people. I have a single column with the name of the salesperson who completed each particular transaction. How do I count repeat multiple values and have it sum up all of them and report to me who had the highest sales and who had the lowest and everything in between. Every formula that I've seen has you identify the value that you're searching for and reports a result, but I have too many values to name, plus I don't even know every value (Salesperson's name) I'm looking for. I'd like a function that scans the column, summarizes every value it found and then tells me how many times that value repeated.

 

[Shrikant]

Sir,
Please try Pivottable. It will make the reports you are looking for.

Select one cell in your data range. Go to Insert>>Pivottable

It would be too descriptive to write the entire procedure, but some googling will help you to set up data in pivottable report.
I will just put brief comment as per your requirement.

1st. Put Sales persons name in Row Labels.
2nd. Put (drag and Drop) Sales value in Column Label. Select summarise data by Sum. This will give you Total Sales amount. You can sort in Descending order to get Highest to lowest sales salesperson
3rd. Put (Drag and Drop) sales value again in column label. Select Summarise data by count. THis will give you how many transactions have been made by a sales person.

I hope this tip is helpful.

 

[NerdMonster]

Thank you!!!!

Thank you for pointing me in the right direction. I wasn't aware of the PivotTable feature, I'm fairly new to Excel. I needed to add a column with a numerical value that corresponded with each name in the list. I added a column and used the Cntrl+Enter option to paste a value of 1 to each name. I then incorporated the new column into the PivotTable data. I selected the salesperson's name as the row labels and the column with the numerical 1 as the values. I summed up the values and Viola! I had my salesperson report. Perfect. Again, thank you for your prompt assistance.