MrExcel.com - Your One Stop for Excel Tips & Solutions

Excel 2020: One Hit Wonders with UNIQUE

September 28, 2020 - by

Excel One Hit Wonders with UNIQUE. Photo Credit: Eric Nopanen at Unsplash.com

For me, I can't imagine why I would ever need a list of items that have been sold exactly once. My only example is the One-Hit Wonders segment on Casey Kasem's American Top 40 radio show.

To get a list of artists who had exactly one hit, use =UNIQUE(B4:B6132..True). In the figure below, the UNIQUE function is wrapped in a SORT function so the resulting list is alphabetical.

By using TRUE for the Occurs_Once argument in UNIQUE, you can find the artists who only appeared once in the original database. Sort those alphabetically using =SORT(UNIQUE(B4:B6132,False,True)).

To get the titles in column J, a VLOOKUP uses an array as the first argument. This is pretty wild - one VLOOKUP formula is actually doing over 1000 lookups and returning all 1000 results.

To get the title next to the artist, use =VLOOKUP(I5#,B4:C6132,2,False). You know that these one-hit-wonder artists only appear once in the database, so VLOOKUP works.

Another approach is to use a FILTER function combined with IFERROR and MATCH.

Use =FILTER(A4:D6132,IFERROR(MATCH(B4:B6132,UNIQUE(B4:B6132,False,True),0),False)) to return all four columns from the table.

Title Photo: Eric Nopanen at Unsplash.com

This article is an excerpt from MrExcel 2020 - Seeing Excel Clearly.