First off: hello everyone!

I have an interesting problem, and I have been looking for the solution just about everywhere!

I have a table in excel, with a header. Within that table, I have three columns of data, which contain various topics, like so:

M N O P
1 education justice law
2 privacy law
3 entertainment education
4 education courts police records


I need a count of each occurrence of a topic within those four columns. Using the previous example, I would get a result like this:

AA BB
education 3
privacy 1
law 2

...and so forth and so on.

The important thing here: I have no idea what the topics will be. So that kills COUNTIF and similar functions. After all my looking for solutions, I'm beginning to have the sneaking suspicion that this can only be solved via VBA code. If that's truly the case, please note in advance that I am a VBA newbie...I found out how to enable it in Excel 2010, and that's about it! So please be clear in providing any steps I need to take.

I'd GREATLY appreciate anyone's help...I'm really stumped! Thanks in advance!