Hi Neil
It is definitely worth learning about Pivot Tables and here is a great place
to start
http://peltiertech.com/Excel/Pivots/pivotstart.htm
and also look at Debra's site
http://www.contextures.com/xlPivot05.html

--
Regards

Roger Govier


"Neil Goldwasser" wrote in
message ...
Thanks for your help!
Unfortunately I have never used PivotTables. I just had a quick look, but
I'm baffled.
I guess I'll need to consult an guidebook!
Thanks, Neil Goldwasser



"Duke Carey" wrote:

You could do what you want with a pivot table - which gives you the
opportunity to limit the presentation to the top n of whatever you are
summarizing.

Select a cell anywhere in your data, go to the Data menu and choose Pivot
table..., make sure Excel has selected the correct range, and click on
Finish. You can then drag fields from the pop-up box to the pivot table
and
adjust settings. Experiment a little and you should get what you want

"Neil Goldwasser" wrote:

Hello. If anybody could please help me here I'd be really, really
grateful!

I have a worksheet that monitors which courses people are attending.
For
each person, the course code is entered into one column and the
department
that runs that course is entered in a different column. The course
codes will
come up more than once, and the number of times will vary, depending on
how
many people are on that course. What I need to do is find a way of
getting
excel to work out the ten most popular course codes for each
department, and
then count how many times that code comes up in the worksheet.
Unfortunately
there are several hundreds of courses run across all departments, so it
needs
something better than what I can currently do.

There will not be any blank cells mixed in with the data, but there
might be
a lot of "N/A" entries where a course is not known for any particular
person
(I would rather it didn't count these as a single course, as it is
highly
likely that the "unknown" entry would make the top ten.)

If possible I would also like it to count how many "other" courses
there are
that did not make it into the top ten, and how many entries these
courses
have combined (this time counting any N/A cells). Hopefully a table
would
then be possible for each department separately, e.g.

POSITION DEPT. COURSE # Entries
1 ACE AB123 15
2 ACE CD456 14
3 ACE EF789 11
... etc. ... etc. ... etc. ... etc.
10 ACE ZY987 4
OTHER ACE 45 other courses 89 (Between all 45)

and so on...

Ideally, it would be great to be also able to pick out the ten most
popular
courses across all departments, and put this in another table, e.g.

POSITION DEPT. COURSE # Entries
1 ACE AB123 15
2 BUC CC261 14
3 ACE CD456 14
... etc. ... etc. ... etc. ... etc.
10 CET AA910 8
OTHER ALL 247 other courses 352 (Between all 247)


Does anybody know a way of doing such a thing? It would help me out so
much
if you did!

If this looks a bit too complicated, are there other more simple
versions
possible, e.g. just counting across all departments, and maybe
extending it
to the top 30; printing the names of courses that come up more than 8
times;
counting the number of unique course codes, and listing each code that
comes
up; counting the number of unique course codes for each department; and
so
on...


It is for a good cause if anybody is willing to help.
Many thanks in advance, Neil Goldwasser