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I'd like to count the occurrence of unique items found in one column of about 120 items. I can't find a way to do this in Numbers.app

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  • Currently, if I do this calculation in the footer row, or another table, they both show up as "0" – Greg Kerstine Jul 5 '12 at 23:05
  • Shows up as "0" because I'm not sure how to use the Count function really well. – Greg Kerstine Jul 7 '12 at 23:28
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Here is a clever solution posted in an apple discussions thread.

You basically create another column, and use the formula =IF(COUNTIF(A$1:A1, A2)=0,1,""). This will display a one for the first occurrence of each unique item. You then simply sum the whole column and you get your count.

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  • Your Welcome! :) – kevin9794 Jul 12 '12 at 18:56
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    This is extremely slow when there's lots of data. If that's the case, you can import your data into Google Spreadsheets and use =COUNTUNIQUE(A:A) – Eugene Kulabuhov May 31 '17 at 14:04
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If it doesn't have to be updated dynamically, you might also copy the cells and run something like pbpaste | sort | uniq | wc -l.

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    Copy the column and run pbpaste| sort | uniq -c in a terminal. – vrypan Feb 2 '15 at 8:24
  • why do you need sort? – CousinCocaine Apr 13 '15 at 17:59
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    @CousinCocaine you need sort because uniq only detects repeated lines immediately following each other, not repeated lines anywhere in the input stream. See uniq man page. – Fabian Tamp Nov 20 '15 at 4:24
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    You can also use sort -u instead of sort | uniq – damiankloip Feb 23 '16 at 15:43
  • This one is always better than clunky gui, thanks for the reminder bro! – valignatev Jun 1 '17 at 21:09

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