Debbie,
I should probably have commented about using a pivot table.
That will summarize very nicely all your data, and give you a count of
howmany occurances each item has as well.
For some excellent resources on pivot tables see:

http://www.cpearson.com/excel/pivots.htm
http://peltiertech.com/Excel/Pivots/pivotstart.htm
http://www.contextures.com/xlPivot02.html
http://www.contextures.com/xlPivot01.html
http://www.ozgrid.com/Excel/excel-pivot-tables.htm



"Debbie t" wrote:

Is there a simple way I can count only one occurence of a text value in a
list where there are several duplicates.
Thanks