Short list of values from long list of duplicates

Okay, after searching and trying - I think I'm going to need INDEX and maybe MATCH but those are not commands I use in my day-to-day, so I'm stumped on how to make them work.

I've got a column of dates, (not sequential, several days skip). I want to build a "short list" of all the date values in the column - so that even though 2/5/2012 shows up 12 times, I want it to appear on a list once. I can copy the cells down as much as I need to - until I identify all the possible dates from the column.
Ultimately, the next column to the right would have a countif statement involving my result and the column, to give me an occurance count for each date. The 'short list' can occur at the bottom of the date column, or in another column, no matter.

file attached.


thanks a million for any and all assistance!

thanks all!

I didn't describe the whole issue very well - I needed to keep the column intact - each date has lots of specific error data attached to it and aside from the error count (date occurence) for statistical use, I need to keep it "whole" to investigate each error. I toyed with the auto-filter option but for reporting that would be a bit manual - select the date, count the occurrences, enter that error count into the statistical system, then go back and work the errors. I thought it would be nice to just 'see' the counts and move on to the bulk of the work.

I appreciate all the responses, Haseeb's solution will work for me. THANKS!