Frequency counter — count how often each value appears in a column

How to use the frequency counter

1. Press Choose a file to load a CSV, TSV or Excel file, or paste data into CSV data.
2. Check the Delimiter and First row is a header settings.
3. Type the Column to count (name or number), such as plan or 6.
4. If cells hold lists, set Split cells on (optional). Choose whether to Ignore upper/lower case, Ignore spaces around values and Count blank cells.
5. Set Show the top (0 = all) and Sort by (Count or Value A → Z), then use the table’s CSV button to save frequency.csv.

What it does and when to use it

A frequency table is often the first thing to make from survey answers, sign-up data or a support log: which plan is most popular, which city most customers come from, which reason for leaving comes up most, or which tags are used most often. It also exposes messy data: untick the two Ignore options, and variants such as “Pune” and “pune “ show up as separate rows.

The results table pastes straight into the horizontal bar chart (Value and Count columns) for a ranked chart, or the donut chart maker for a few categories. To count the same thing split by a second field, such as plan by country, use the pivot table builder. For words in running text rather than a column, try the word frequency counter.

How it works

The file is parsed in your browser and the chosen column is taken from every data row. With a split character, each cell is cut into pieces. Then each value is trimmed (if Ignore spaces is ticked) and lower-cased for matching (if Ignore case is ticked). Equal values are added up:

Percent = count ÷ values counted × 100
Share   = count ÷ highest count, drawn as a 20-character bar

The stats show the values counted, the number of distinct values and the blank cells found. If you leave the column box empty, the first column is counted. Nothing is uploaded.

Worked examples

Plans in the customer sample. Seven customers, column plan:

Value | Count | Percent | Share
Pro | 3 | 42.86 | ████████████████████
Free | 2 | 28.57 | █████████████▍
Team | 2 | 28.57 | █████████████▍

Free and Team tie on 2, so they are listed A to Z.

Tags split on a semicolon. Cells red; blue, Blue and red;green, split on ; with case ignored. Five tags are counted: blue 2 (40%), red 2 (40%) and green 1 (20%). “blue” keeps the lower-case spelling because it appeared first.

Top 2 cities, A to Z. Column city, top 2, sorted by value. Every city appears once, so the table shows Berlin and Dubai at 1 each (14.29%) and its label says “top 2 of 7”.

Limits and tips

• Only one column is counted at a time.
• Matching is exact after trimming and lower-casing: “NYC” and “New York” are different values.
• Numbers are counted as text, so 5 and 5.0 are separate values. For averages and spread, use the summary statistics calculator.