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How to find the least or most common / frequent value in Excel?

Author: Xiaoyang Last Modified: 2024-11-04

When you work on Excel workbook, sometimes, you may need to find the least common or frequent value in a column or a row of the worksheet. Excepting find it one by one manually, there is a formula which combine the Index, Match, Min and Countif functions can quickly return the least frequently occurring value.

Find the least common / frequent value with array formula

Find the most common / frequent value with Kutools for Excel

arrow blue right bubble Find the least common / frequent value with array formula

To extract the least common value of the list, the below formula may help you. Please do as this:

1. In a blank cell where you want to place the result, please enter this formula: =INDEX(A2:A16,MATCH(MIN(COUNTIF(A2:A16,A2:A16)),COUNTIF(A2:A16,A2:A16),0)), see screenshot:

A screenshot of formula for finding the least common value in Excel

2. And then press Shift + Ctrl + Enter keys together, and you will get the value which appears least time of the column, see screenshot:

A screenshot of the least common value result in Excel

Notes:

1. In the above formula, A2:A16 is the data range that you want to get the least frequent value from.

2. If there are blank cells in the data list, this formula will not work.

3. This formula will only return the first least common value if there are multiple values meet this criterion.

arrow blue right bubble Find the most common / frequent value with Kutools for Excel

Find and return the most common / frequent value in a list:

With Kutools for Excel’s Find most common value feature, you can find and extract the most frequent value from a column in Excel quickly without any formula.

A screenshot showing Kutools for Excel feature for finding the most common value in a list

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