Function to Find Most Common Text Based on Criteria

Hello,

I am looking for a function, similar to SUMIF, but for text instead of numbers. I have looked at using INDEX MATCH but this does not allow me to set a criteria. The example data is below:

Reason for Absence	Department
Injury Outside Work	Production
Cold/Flu	Production
Headache/Migraine	Production
Cold/Flu	Production
Cold/Flu	Research and Design
Cold/Flu	Research and Design
Infection	Administration
Gynaecological	Administration
Infection	Administration

I want excel to search for the criteria, e.g. Administration, and then look for the most common text in the Reason for Absence column.

Is this possible?

Thank you in advance.

or a formula compatible with your staed Excel product (excel 2016):

=INDEX($A$2:$A$10,MODE(IF($B$2:$B$10=E1,MATCH($A$2:$A$10,$A$2:$A$10,0))))

You seem to be using an older version of Excel than me. So, please refer to the attached file. If the formulae are enclosed within a pair of { }, these are array formulae.

These are a little different from ordinary formulae in that they MUST be confirmed in the FIRST CELL ONLY by pressing CTRL+SHIFT+ENTER to activate the array, not just ENTER. After that, the array can be dragged down as normal, to cover the desired range.

You will know the array is active when you see the curly brackets { } appear around the outside of your formula. If you do not use CTRL+SHIFT+ENTER you will (almost always) get an error message or an incorrect answer. Press F2 on that cell and try again.

Don't type the curly brackets yourself - it won't work...

One Question... can there be TIES... with multiple values occurring n times

You're welcome. I used to use PTs a lot... but since they need to be refreshed when anything is changed... I stopped using them pretty much completely.