Excel - How to find number of times strings appear in column - excel

Question

This is my first post, I'm still a beginner at excel!
I created a python script that scrapes the Billboard Hip Hop/R&B Charts and populates the data to an excel spreadsheet. My data looks like this:
Headers are Billboard Number, Artist Name and Song Title.
1 Drake Nice For What
2 Post Malone Featuring Ty Dolla $ign Psycho
3 Drake God's Plan
4 Post Malone Better Now
5 Post Malone Featuring 21 Savage Rockstar
6 BlocBoy JB Featuring Drake Look Alive
7 Post Malone Paranoid
8 Lil Dicky Featuring Chris Brown Freaky Friday
9 Post Malone Rich & Sad
10 Post Malone Featuring Swae Lee Spoil My Night
11 Post Malone Featuring Nicki Minaj Ball For Me
12 Migos Featuring Drake Walk It Talk It
13 Post Malone Featuring G-Eazy & YG Same Bitches
14 Cardi B| Bad Bunny & J Balvin I Like It
15 Post Malone Zack And Codeine
16 Post Malone Over Now
17 Cardi B Be Careful
18 Post Malone Takin' Shots
19 The Weeknd & Kendrick Lamar Pray For Me
20 Rich The Kid Plug Walk
21 The Weeknd Call Out My Name
22 Bruno Mars & Cardi B Finesse
23 Post Malone Candy Paint
24 Ella Mai Boo'd Up
25 Rae Sremmurd & Juicy J Powerglide
26 Post Malone 92 Explorer
27 J. Cole ATM
28 J. Cole KOD
29 Post Malone Otherside
30 Post Malone Blame It On Me
31 J. Cole Kevin's Heart
32 Kendrick Lamar & SZA All The Stars
33 Nicki Minaj Chun-Li
34 Lil Pump Esskeetit
35 Migos Stir Fry
36 Famous Dex Japan
37 Post Malone Sugar Wraith
38 Cardi B Featuring Migos Drip
39 XXXTENTACION Sad!
40 Jay Rock| Kendrick Lamar| Future & James Blake King's Dead
41 Rich The Kid Featuring Kendrick Lamar New Freezer
42 Logic & Marshmello Everyday
43 J. Cole Motiv8
44 YoungBoy Never Broke Again Outside Today
45 Post Malone Jonestown (Interlude)
46 Cardi B Featuring 21 Savage Bartier Cardi
47 YoungBoy Never Broke Again Overdose
48 J. Cole 1985 (Intro To The Fall Off)
49 J. Cole Photograph
50 Khalid| Ty Dolla $ign & 6LACK OTW
I want to count the total number times an artist appears under Artist Name including if they were featured in a song and also display top charting song. For example:
Headers are Artist Name, Billboard Appearances and Top Song.
Post Malone 17 Psycho
J.Cole 6 ATM
Cardi B 5 I Like It
Drake 4 Nice For What
Migos 3 Walk It Talk It
YoungBoy Never Broke Again 2 Outside Today
Rich The Kid 2 Plug Walk
21 Savage 2 Rockstar
...
How can I achieve this?

Answer 1

If you already have all artist names, use countif and vlookup with wildcard.
ps. Make sure your artist names are correct. Your sample data J.cole didn't contain whitespace, it will return wrong result.

Answer 2

First you need to do what's called data cleaning to get a list of the artists on the billboards.
To get a list of the unique artists copy the list of your data to a new space on your spreadsheet. Then select all of your data and run the "Remove Duplicates" function (under the Data tab) selecting the artist column. This will give you a list of all the unique artists and give you their top song to boot.
Now all those X featuring Y artist "names" will be unique, so you will need to filter it down some more. Search for the "Featuring" linker word with the Find function and use that combined with the Left function to grab only the first artist. Something like this, =IFERROR(LEFT(I3,FIND("Featuring",I3)-2),I3)
This function uses the iferror function to pass through names that don't have the "Featuring" word. Then do the same thing on that resulting column for & and | and that will give you a pretty clean list of single artists.
To get the featured artists, do a similar thing using the Right function instead of the Left function.
After you get that clean list do the unique artists filter again to condense it down. From there you can use that with your vlookup or find functions to start counting.

Answer 3

You can use Power Query (Get & Transform Data) to manipulate your table:
let
Source = Excel.CurrentWorkbook(){[Name="tbInput"]}[Content],
#"Changed Type" = Table.TransformColumnTypes(
Source,
{{"Billboard Number", Int64.Type},
{"Artist Name", type text},
{"Song Title", type text}}),
#"Split Column by Delimiters" = Table.ExpandListColumn(
Table.TransformColumns(
#"Changed Type",
{{"Artist Name", Splitter.SplitTextByAnyDelimiter({"Featuring","|","&"}, QuoteStyle.None),
let itemType = (type nullable text) meta [Serialized.Text = true] in type {itemType}}}),
"Artist Name"),
#"Trimmed Text" = Table.TransformColumns(
#"Split Column by Delimiters",
{{"Artist Name", Text.Trim, type text}}),
#"Artist Highest Position" = Table.Group(
#"Trimmed Text",
{"Artist Name"},
{{"Highest Position", each List.Min([Billboard Number]),
type number}}),
#"Merge 1" = Table.NestedJoin(
#"Artist Highest Position",
{"Artist Name", "Highest Position"},
#"Trimmed Text",
{"Artist Name", "Billboard Number"},
"Merged",
JoinKind.LeftOuter),
#"Highest Song" = Table.ExpandTableColumn(
#"Merge 1", "Merged", {"Song Title"}, {"Song Title"}),
#"Artist Count" = Table.Group(
#"Trimmed Text",
{"Artist Name"},
{{"Count", each Table.RowCount(_), type number}}),
#"Merge 2" = Table.NestedJoin(
#"Artist Count",
{"Artist Name"},
#"Highest Song",
{"Artist Name"},
"Merged",
JoinKind.LeftOuter),
#"Expanded Merged" = Table.ExpandTableColumn(
#"Merge 2", "Merged", {"Song Title"}, {"Song Title"}),
#"Sorted Rows" = Table.Sort(#"Expanded Merged",{{"Count", Order.Descending}})
in
#"Sorted Rows"
Which gives the output:

Answer 4

The hard part is cleaning the data to get a unique list of artist names.
Examining your list, it seems that when there are multiple artist names listed for a single song, they will be separated by Featuring, &, or |
If that is always the case, you can use a VBA macro to separate the names, and then use a Dictionary to collect a list of the names.
While you are creating that list, it is trivial to also obtain the Count of times the artist appears, and also the top rated song (which would be the song associated with the first instance of that name).
We utilize a User Defined Object (Class) to hold the information, and collect those objects into a Dictionary keyed to the artist name.
Note also that we read the worksheet data into a VBA array, and iterate through the array. This usually runs an order of magnitude faster than iterating through the actual worksheet.
To obtain the report, we would then output the results onto a worksheet.
Class Module
Option Explicit
'Class module **RENAME**: cArtist
Public Cnt As Long
Public Song As String
Regular Module
Option Explicit
Option Compare Text
Sub Artists()
Dim dA As Dictionary, cA As cArtist
Dim vSrc, vRes
Dim wsSrc As Worksheet, wsRes As Worksheet, rRes As Range
Dim V, W, X, Y, Z, A, B
Dim I As Long
Dim sKey As String
Set wsSrc = Worksheets("sheet6")
With wsSrc
vSrc = .Range(.Cells(2, 2), .Cells(.Rows.Count, 2).End(xlUp)).Resize(columnsize:=2)
End With
Set wsRes = Worksheets("sheet6")
Set rRes = wsRes.Cells(1, 6)
Set dA = New Dictionary
For I = 1 To UBound(vSrc, 1)
W = Split(vSrc(I, 1), "Featuring")
For Each X In W
Y = Split(X, "|")
For Each Z In Y
A = Split(Z, "&")
For Each B In A
sKey = Trim(B)
Set cA = New cArtist
With cA
.Cnt = 1
.Song = Trim(vSrc(I, 2))
End With
If Not dA.Exists(sKey) Then
dA.Add Key:=sKey, Item:=cA
Else
dA(sKey).Cnt = dA(sKey).Cnt + 1
End If
Next B
Next Z
Next X
Next I
ReDim vRes(0 To dA.Count, 1 To 3)
vRes(0, 1) = "Artist Name"
vRes(0, 2) = "Billboard Appearances"
vRes(0, 3) = "Top Song"
I = 0
For Each V In dA.Keys
I = I + 1
With dA(V)
vRes(I, 1) = V
vRes(I, 2) = .Cnt
vRes(I, 3) = .Song
End With
Next V
Set rRes = rRes.Resize(UBound(vRes, 1) + 1, UBound(vRes, 2))
With rRes
.EntireColumn.Clear
.Value = vRes
.Sort key1:=rRes(1, 2), order1:=xlDescending, key2:=rRes(1, 1), order2:=xlAscending, MatchCase:=False, Header:=xlYes
.Style = "Output"
With .Columns(2)
.ColumnWidth = .ColumnWidth / 2
.WrapText = True
.HorizontalAlignment = xlCenter
End With
With .Rows(1)
.HorizontalAlignment = xlCenter
.VerticalAlignment = xlCenter
End With
.EntireColumn.AutoFit
End With
End Sub
Output given your Input above