I have a spreadsheet with a column that has a dropdown list in each row to assign a project to a person's name. (each row is a new project) I need a formula to calculate how many projects each person is assigned.
Add the name column to both the Rows area and the Values area of the pivot table.
If you prefer formulas, check out the UNIQUE function to return a list of unique names, and the COUNTIF function to return the number of occurrences of each name.
