Excel noob in need of assistance

[Raumarik]

Morning chaps,

I've no idea if this is possible but thought I'd ask as I'm back doing my reports and trawling through a mountain of data yet again.

Essentially I produce reports on incidents at our work, they are high level so really only focus on showing overall improvements with the same quarter the previous year. Now the date/time format that comes out looks like this:

2015-09-24 16:34:07.0

There can be thousands of such entries, I use a little formula to trim this as I'm only interested in the date (as it's quarter on quarter comparisons)

"=VALUE(TRIM(CLEAN(A3)))"

This trims it back to just the date, I copy an paste special (just values), then using pivot tables I then count up the number of dates and shove them into a table together.

Is this the simplest way of doing it or can I somehow streamline this? As per usual the system I'm putting this data from isn't meant to produce summary reports or comparisons like this, so it all ends up in Excel, classic case of management wanting something they didn't spec.

 

[Lifelong]

Could you not change the formatting of the cells? And then just use pivot table to see total? Or use the below:

=SUMPRODUCT(1/COUNTIF(A1:A10,A1:A10))

 

[Grrrrr]

You've not exactly said what you're hoping to achieve. If it's simply counting the number of incidents per date, then i think your pivot table method is probably best