What is the best method for filtering a growing list of customer names?

Hi,
I apologize if I'm in the wrong section with this question. I have an accounting spreadsheet that tracks individual sales orders for an online store. I use a separate sheet for each month, and so the single file accounts for one year of all sales. I would like to create a second file with a table that allows me to filter our growing list of customers for marketing analysis. The customer list is needed to tabulate a monthly value for the following:

• # of unique new customers each month (taking into account the accumulated list of all unique customers from all months before)
• running tally next to customer's name showing how many separate orders each customer has made

The ultimate goal is to have a single table to organize each unique customer, from A-Z. I'm fairly inexperienced at excel. This may be an easy problem to solve. Can anyone point me in the right direction?

Thanks for any help!
mcg



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Originally Posted by FDibbins

Hi and welcome to the forum

Have you looked at using a Pivot Table for this?

Yes, I looked at the Pivot Table, but that's about as far as I got. I don't really understand how it would apply specifically to filtering names. All the examples I've found explaining tables deal with calculating values. My hope in posting is that I find a closer example to look at.

Thanks,
mcg