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J741 J741 is offline
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Default How to get a numbered list of unique words in a column?

Hi.

I have a spreadsheet with almost 5000 rows with about 15 columns of data, 2
columns of which contain sentences, phrases, or paragraphs of comments
entered by users.

What I need to have as an end result is a list of all unique words found in
those two columns, along with the number of occurrences of each word. I will
then use this to further analyze the data in the spreadsheet.

Right now, I do this manually and it takes a VERY long time for me to do so
(over 200 man-hours). So, I really need to automate this somehow.

The problem is, I have no idea how to begin, because the words will not be
by themselves in their own cell (so I cant use the auto filter functions,
pivot tables, or anything else I can think of), but will be part of groups of
words or symbols within multiple cells.

I think this will need to be done programmatically with code, scripts,
macros, or some other method with which I am not familiar, but I am just not
sure.

Can anyone help me with this? Can anyone point me in the right direction?
Is there anything already built in to excel to do this?

- James.