Everytime a user downloads my software their name and profile information gets added to an excel spreadsheet. So, if they come back multiple times, I can see that they have done so by the number of times their name appears in the spreadsheet.

I need to be able to count each company name and chart how many times it repeats in the list... thereby counting how many times companyX downloaded my software.

I could use the "countif" function, but I have 5,458 entries and ~1800 of those are unique entries AND they are TEXT not numbers, otherwise I could solve this by doing the countif on the uniques and apply it to the larger full list. But, I don't know how to use the countif function for each of those entries when they are text without laboriously typing, in quotes, each unique name.

Do I need to conver the text into numbers and then work with the data? It would be another trick to convert it back to text so that I knew what I was looking at.

Here's an example of my list:
alpha medium group
Alpha Square LLC
Alpine
AlpineSoft
Alsdorf
Altera
altibase
AMD
AMD India
AMD Japan
amf
AMI
AMnesty
Amphora
amsah
AMST
Anatomical Travelogue
Anita Grant Ltd
anonym
Anonymous
Ansys Fluent India Pvt Ltd
Applanix
apple
Apple Inc.
Applied Acoustics Systems DVM Inc.
Applied Materials
Apprender
apstudio


There are a ton of uniques... another thing that would be helpful would be if i could just sort by the number of repeats... so for example AMD, AMD, AMD, Intel, Intel, Apple.

Is there any easy way to do that at least?

thanks,
Sharon