For a research project, I am trying to find out how often patients have been admitted to various hospital departments. For each department I have an Excel file with loads of data, but have stripped it down to two columns: patient ID and date admitted. Each patient (around 300 of them) has been admitted loads of times, so each sheet has over 20,000 rows, something like this:
ID1 23/07/15
ID1 25/08/15
ID1 09/01/16
ID2 14/06/14
ID2 12/08/15
Except there are way more dates per patient than just two or three.
Now I obviously don't want to go through 20,000 rows (per file, of which I have six) and count everything by hand. What I need is a way to:
a) remove entire rows containing duplicate dates following each other (for some reason the same patient often has two identical admission dates in two adjacent rows)
and
b) have Excel count the total number of dates (i.e. rows) per patient, based on identical ID in the first column.
After playing around with it for a bit I have found ways to highlight duplicates following each other (with conditional formatting), but I can't get Excel to delete the entire row for me, or do the counting.
Is there a way to achieve this in Excel, or will I have to do it all by hand?