Overview

This blog post describes how to create a list of unique distinct words from a cell range. Unique distinct words are all words but duplicate words are only listed once.

Cell range A2:A14 contains words, see picture.

Rick Rothstein (MVP - Excel) helped me out here with a powerful user defined function (udf).


Array formula in cell B2:B23

=ListOfWords($A$2:$A$18, TRUE) + CTRL + SHIFT + ENTER

Select all the cells to be filled, then type the above formula  into the Formula Bar and press CTRL+SHIFT+ENTER

Array formula in cell C2:C23

=ListOfWords($A$2:$A$18, FALSE) + CTRL + SHIFT + ENTER

Select all the cells to be filled, then type the above formula  into the Formula Bar and press CTRL+SHIFT+ENTER

User defined function

Instructions

  1. You can select far more cells to load the formulas in than are required by the list. The empty text string will be displayed for cells not having an entry.
  2. You can specify a larger range than the there are filled in cells as the argument to these macros to allow for future entries in the column.
  3. You can specify whether the listing is to be case sensitive or not via the optional second argument with the default value being FALSE, meaning duplicated entries with different casing like One, one, ONE, onE, etc.. will all be treated as if they were the same word with the same spelling. If you pass TRUE for that optional second argument, then those words would all be treated as if they were different words.
  4. For all the "Case Insensitive" listing, the words are listed in Proper Case (first letter upper case, remaining letters lower case). The reason being if you had One, one and ONE then there is not reason to prefer one version over another, so I solved the problem by using Proper Case throughout.

VBA Code:

Function ListOfWords(Rng As Range, Optional  CaseSensitive As Boolean) As Variant
Dim X As Long, Index As Long,  List As String, Words() As String, LoW As Variant
With  WorksheetFunction
 Words =  Split(.Trim(Replace(Join(.Transpose(Rng)), Chr(160), "  ")))
 LoW = Split(Space(.Max(UBound(Words),  Application.Caller.Count) + 1))
 For X = 0 To  UBound(Words)
  If InStr(1, Chr(1) & List  & Chr(1), Chr(1) & Words(X) & Chr(1), 1 - Abs(CaseSensitive)) = 0  Then 
   List = List & Chr(1)  & Words(X)
   If CaseSensitive  Then
    LoW(Index) =  Words(X)
   Else
    LoW(Index) =  StrConv(Words(X), vbProperCase)
   End If
  Index = Index +  1
  End If
 Next
 ListOfWords = .Transpose(LoW)
End  With
End Function

How to implement user defined function in excel

  1. Press Alt-F11 to open visual basic editor
  2. Click Module on the Insert menu
  3. Copy and paste the above user defined function
  4. Exit visual basic editor
  5. Select a sheet
  6. Select a cell range
  7. Type =ListOfWords($A$2:$A$18, TRUE) into formula bar and press CTRL+SHIFT+ENTER

Download excel example file

Unique distinct words.xls
(Excel 97-2003  Workbook *.xls)

Download Rick Rothstein´s excel example file

Word Listing Code.xls
(Excel 97-2003  Workbook *.xls)

Many thanks to Rick Rothstein (Mvp - Excel)!!