Post B1Rky6dknBcwt4T6OW by MLE_online@social.afront.org
 (DIR) More posts by MLE_online@social.afront.org
 (DIR) Post #B1Rky0NE5iqFS4gong by MLE_online@social.afront.org
       2025-12-20T16:45:37Z
       
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       Are any of you out there big-time spreadsheet whizzes? I'm trying to figure something out
       
 (DIR) Post #B1Rky1qKcziY0dJZo0 by MLE_online@social.afront.org
       2025-12-20T16:54:49Z
       
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       All right, a few of you replied, so let's see if we can get anywhere. I have a lot of data representing the number of times various news outlets covered a topic. Right now the pie chart shows everything in kind of a big mess because it orders slices in the same order as the column it's based off of. The column is organized alphabetically so I can actually see what's going on, but that makes the pie chart look terrible. Is there a way to sort a column so that the entries are ordered by the number of them that there are? i.e. If Zebra World Magazine has 15 entries, CNN has 14 entries, and North Pole Gazette has 13, they would appear with the Zebra Word Magazine entries first, followed by CNN Entries, and then North Pole Gazette entries?If not, is there some other way to get this pie chart to be ordered by slice size?FOR CLARITY: I don't have a count column. If I did, this would be easy. There are too many items for me to easily sit there counting them.
       
 (DIR) Post #B1Rky2qMuLLD72L7VA by ephemeromorph@topspicy.social
       2025-12-20T17:13:41Z
       
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       @MLE_online Overall goal: make another table with just the unique names (appearing only once each) in one column, and the count of each in the other column. Generate the pie chart from that.1. Get unique names: in a fresh sheet, use a UNIQUE formula to grab the names from the original table. It'll be something like "=UNIQUE(Table1[Column1])".2. Get the count with COUNTIF. Something like "=COUNTIF(Table1[Column1],$A1)" where $A is the column in this new table that holds the unique names.
       
 (DIR) Post #B1Rky40gZTBijKAsDo by ephemeromorph@topspicy.social
       2025-12-20T17:15:45Z
       
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       @MLE_online I'm constrained by character limits, but I think you can do this using the UNIQUE and COUNTIF formulae. There'll be other ways to accomplish the same outcome; off the top of my head I can think of scraping the table into Power Query and making that do the counting. Probably pivot tables will do it too because they're for aggregating data. I hate pivot tables though.
       
 (DIR) Post #B1Rky5BiBxbONoLC2y by MLE_online@social.afront.org
       2025-12-20T17:17:05Z
       
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       @ephemeromorph I don't know anything about Power Query or pivot tables, so let's pretend those don't exist
       
 (DIR) Post #B1Rky6dknBcwt4T6OW by MLE_online@social.afront.org
       2025-12-20T16:58:03Z
       
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       I feel like if sorting what's here isn't a direct option, there must be a way to make the spread sheet count up the number of each type of cell (based on the text inside) and spit those numbers out in a column next to the column with the names. I can't figure out how to do that either though
       
 (DIR) Post #B1RkyBljivz2nHF320 by MLE_online@social.afront.org
       2025-12-20T17:22:49Z
       
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       Thank you to @Legit_Spaghetti and @johnnydecimal for helping me sort this out. Thank you to the rest of you, too, for contributing.