Dunno if Chip Pearson's material will help. See
Duplicate And Unique Items In Lists
http://www.cpearson.com/excel/duplicat.htm
(the stuff dealing with unique items is towards the bottom)
and
Eliminating Blank Cells From Lists
http://www.cpearson.com/excel/noblanks.htm

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Regards,

Tushar Mehta
www.tushar-mehta.com
Excel, PowerPoint, and VBA add-ins, tutorials
Custom MS Office productivity solutions

In article ,
says...
I have a large problem that I cannot find a simple formula for. Been looking
and trying now for over a year.

As follows: A1:A100 is filled with data that is often repeated. There may
also be some blanks. In this data there may be anywhere from 2 to 100 unique
pieces of data that I would like to extract and put in column B1 thru
B....(however many unique pieces of data have been extracted).

Example:
A B
1 George George
2 Sam Mike
3 Mike Sam
4 Sam Zachary
5 George
6 Mike
7 Zachary
8 Sam
9 George
10 Zachary

It seems so simple and I cant believe Microsoft does not have a formula or
function for this. Keep in mind that this is an example and the real
worksheets have thousands of entries with 100s of unique pieces of data. This
appears to be a fundamental stopping point for me in creating spreadsheets
that automatically create reports for me without bogging down the computer.
I have gotten around it by using Rank, match, and index but it really bogs
me down and if it doesnt go into "not responding" then it could take up to 10
minutes to open. (Pent 4.., etc. state of the art up to date computers)

Would very very much appreciate a simple formula that can achieve this.
Thank you