Hey everyone! I’m working on a spreadsheet and need some help. I’ve got a column with a bunch of animal names repeated. It looks like this:
Cat
Dog
Donkey
Rat
Cat
Dog
Cat
Donkey
Cat
What I’m trying to do is figure out the top 3 most common animals in this list. I want to see these top 3 show up in another column, sorted by how often they appear.
From what I can tell, it should end up being Cat, Dog, and Donkey. But I’m not sure how to make the spreadsheet do this automatically. Is there a formula or function I can use to count and rank these items? Any tips would be super helpful! Thanks in advance!
I’ve tackled a similar problem before, and here’s what worked for me:
First, use a PivotTable. It’s a powerful tool that can quickly summarize your data. Insert a PivotTable, drag your animal column to the Rows area, and then to the Values area. This will give you a count of each animal.
Next, sort the PivotTable in descending order by the count column. This automatically ranks your animals from most to least common.
To get just the top 3, you can either manually copy them or use a formula like =LARGE() combined with INDEX/MATCH to pull the top 3 values and their corresponding animals into a separate area.
This method is flexible and updates automatically when you add new data. It saved me hours of manual counting and sorting. Hope this helps!
hey there! i’ve dealt with this before. try using the QUERY function. it can count and sort ur data in one go. something like =QUERY(A:A,“select A, count(A) group by A order by count(A) desc limit 3”). this’ll give u the top 3 animals and their counts. good luck!
A practical approach is to use a helper column that computes the frequency of each animal with the COUNTIF function followed by generating a unique list with the UNIQUE function. You can then count the occurrences for each unique entry and apply the SORT and FILTER functions to display the animals in descending order by frequency. This method will yield the top three animals in a separate column. Adjust the cell references according to your data layout to ensure accuracy.