Find the first instance of a number and return value

[stephjayne165]

Hey guys!

Ive been trawling the internet to try and find an answer to this question, but I've not come up with anything that's working as yet.

I'm currently working on a spreadsheet which has 30,000 rows of data. Below is a simplified version of my column a, what I'm after is a formula that will return "something" in the adjacent cell in column B if this is the first time this number has appeared in column a.

Column A.
1
1
1
2
3
3
4
4
4
4


I really hope hope this makes sense, I'm struggling a bit at the moment with the onset of a migraine which generally turns my brain to mush - trying to figure this out definitely isn't helping!

Let me know if you need me to clarify anything further

thanks in advance for your help

 

[Andrew Poulsom]

You can use a formula like:

=IF(COUNTIF(A$1:A1,A1)=1,"Something","")

in B1 copied down.

 

[Rick Rothstein]

If your data in Column A is sorted as your example seems to indicate, then there is an alternate method available. Using the "Something" text that Andrew did, put "Something" in cell B1 (because you know the first item of the list will always meet your condition) and then put this formula in cell B2 and copy it down...

=IF(A1<>A2,"Something","")