Excel - count items from multiple columns

My data looks like (yes, I know it is not structured the way Excel wants it)

Australian French Wimbledon US Open
Carlos Alcaraz
Jannik Sinner Carlos Alcaraz Jannik Sinner Carlos Alcaraz
Jannik Sinner Carlos Alcaraz Carlos Alcaraz Jannik Sinner
Novac Dokovic Novac Dokovic Carlos Alcaraz Novac Dokovic
Raphael Nadal Raphael Nadal Novac Dokovic Carlos Alcaraz
Novac Dokovic Novac Dokovic Novac Dokovic Daniil Medvedev
Novac Dokovic Raphael Nadal [cancelled] Dominic Thiem
Novac Dokovic Raphael Nadal Novac Dokovic Raphael Nadal
Roger Federer Raphael Nadal Novac Dokovic Novac Dokovic

And I want to count all the champions:
22 - Novac Dokovic
20 - Raphael Nadel
etc

Any ideas?

Still trying to understand the problem …

  1. So you first want to identify all the names that appear anywhere in the grid of names, ignoring any duplicates. And present that as a list in a separate section of the sheet.
  2. Then you want to count the corresponding number of entries in the grid which match each of the names from step 1. And enter that into your list next to the corresponding name.
  3. Then you want to sort the result so the name with the most entries is the first, and the name with the least entries is last.

Is that an accurate statement of your goal and one approach to solving it?

Said another way, is the goal to “Have a de-duplicated list of names that appear anywhere in the grid, each accompanied by its number of entries in the grid, and with the list of counts + names sorted by number of entries in descending order”?

Count the number in each column, and add those together?

If you’re willing to manually identify all the names, and enter list of names in your results section of the sheet, having Excel generate the counts are trivial. If your grid is cells B2:F27, then =CountIf(B2:F27, "Carlos Alcaraz") will result in the number of Carlos entries in your grid.

I hope it’s obvious how to generalize that, with a list of names in e.g. column B and a list of CountIf() expressions next to them in column A taking their comparison value from Column B of the same row.

Getting them into sorted order is where it gets hard using just formulas versus macros or pivot tables.

Yes exactly. And to auto update like a pivot table.