Counting incidences of surname and date of birth and rearranging s

[Painless2]

Hope somone can help, this should be easy but I'm new to excel.
I have a sheet of 1000+ names with columns of surname, initial, date of
birth. I need to count the incidence of unique records and then rearrange the
sheet with the name with the most occurrences at the top, and following names
in decreasing incidence. Any ideas gratefully acceted

 

[Mike H]

Hi,

You probably need a 'Helper Column'.

Assuming you names are in column A1:A1000 put this in row 1 of an empty
column and drag down

= COUNTIF($A$1:$A$1000,A1)

Select all you columns including the 'Helper' and sort Descending and the
most common names will be at the top. You can also hide the helper column.

Mike

 

[Painless2]

Thanks Mike, I'll give it ago.
--
painless2

Hi,

You probably need a 'Helper Column'.

Assuming you names are in column A1:A1000 put this in row 1 of an empty
column and drag down

= COUNTIF($A$1:$A$1000,A1)

Select all you columns including the 'Helper' and sort Descending and the
most common names will be at the top. You can also hide the helper column.

Mike

 

[sajay]

Painless it seems really painless!!
i suppose your columns are
surname | initial | dateofbirth |
insert a column and name it as occurance

surname | initial | dateofbirth | occurance

put the formula in occurance column second row = COUNTIF(A2:A2000,A2)
here A2 to A2000 is supposed to be the column with names

fill down the formula.
select the entire range and sort with occurance colum desending order!

is this what you need??