Thank you so much for your help! I am looking at it now and completely understand your approach. the challenge is of course in determining how many times we encounter a cluster of 9, 8, 7,...3,2 duplicates and then to allocate the cells accordingly (C1-C3). Your example took care of this nicely because it is dealing with a known and an easily manageable number of recurring items. In my list of jpg-names however, there will be several hundreds of clusters with say, 9 duplicates, 8, 7 etc. - Perhaps there is a way to just count the entire column returning how many duplicate-clusters exist and in a second step highlight and sort these duplicate clusters according to number of duplicates in each one of them...