I have a 22 sheet workbook and the first tab is the monthly department wide
summary based off the individual employees. One column counts how many
documents was worked on for the month. The employees share work within a
document, or use the same document daily, and therefore the document is
duplicated many times therefore creating a very false representation of how
many unique documents there actually were for that month.
The spreadsheet pulls the information from a column(AK) that displays the
filenames of all documents an employee accessed over the month. So this is
not numerical data. In addition, this populates over the course of a month so
it may be easier to predefine say 100 rows within that column for thier use,
thus creating blanks.
So how can I represent the acutal number of documents without creating
duplicates? I've followed some answers on here, but none seem to work.

Thank you in advance, and I hope this made some sense :).

I failed to mention the setup of the workbook.
Sheet 1- Monthly breakdown
Sheets 2-22-Individual Employees (one sheet for each) Each of the sheets
have a column AK in where they list the document filenames.

So the formula would need to be able to pull from the AK columns from sheets
2-22.