Need to count repeates in a very large list of cells with text

[Sharon]

I have a huge list of repeating company names (5,000+ entries), with ~1800 of
those being unique. I would like to find out the top 10 companies that have
the most repeats. Is there any easy way of doing this? Do I have to convert
the text to numbers and work with that instead? I think I could use the
countif function to do it if it were numbers, by dragging the formula down
the list of unique values... however, that doesn't work with text becuase I
would need to actually type out the value inside the cell and put quote marks
around it.

Got any tricks besides converting text to numbers (if that is even a
possibility)? What else would you recommend?

 

[Barb Reinhardt]

Have you tried using pivot table?

 

[Sharon]

I have not tried that, and I have never actually worked with a pivot table
before. I don't even really know what they do. How would I create a pivot
table from my form?

thanks,
Sharon