Counting frequency of Large Spreadsheets of text

Hi there,

Having a lot of trouble carrying out this rather simple operation.. heres a similar type scenario. I have 2 columns of text:

Apples	A
Apples	A
Apples	B
Apples	B
Orange	A
Orange	A
Orange	A
Orange	B

Essentially I am looking for a way to give me how many Orange A's and B's there are and how many Apple A's and Apple B's there are. I've tried COUNTIF, but in my situation I have thousands and thousands of rows (in this example, over 50 kinds of fruits and 6 different letters of the alphabet) so copying and pasting my COUNTIF formula and editing it seems too slow... I tried dragging my formula down with the corresponding letter but for some reason that action changes the range field.

Can pivot tables/data pilot do it? Haven't worked with that at all..

Thank you so much for your help, this has been bothering me at work for weeks. I would really appreciate it...

-Mike

EDIT: just a little note.. How I've been grinding through it now is using a filter so I only see my "apples" while I count their respective A's, B's, C's.. etc. And then when I'm done I switch my filter to show only my "oranges" and then rinse and repeat. Very tedious.. need more snacks.

if i understand your requirement correctly, then this is a text book case for Pivot Tables.

here, take a look at the sample Pivot Table created out of your data. creating it is very simple too, just navigate to Insert > Pivot Table (ALT > N > V > T) and just follow the prompts. drag and drop columns into various regions to see how they behave. any column that you drop into the Values section can have a number of mathematical operations performed on it (SUM, COUNT, AVERAGE, MIN, MAX, PRODUCT etc.).