About this time last year, I posted a User Defined Function (UDF) that would return a list of unique items from a list: https://newtonexcelbach.wordpress.com/2012/01/31/retrieving-unique-values-from-a-range-or-array/

That post has recently received a few comments, and coincidentally Colin Legg at RAD Excel has recently posted an article entitled Count Distinct, Unique And Successive Values Using FREQUENCY(), so if you just want to count the number of occurrences of different numbers or strings, rather than return a list of them, using the Frequency() function is the way to do it.

Colin’s article is detailed and clear, and I have nothing to add to it, except to note the different usage of words.  Colin uses “distinct” where I used “unique” to mean one copy of each different number (or string), and “unique” to mean numbers or strings that occur only once.  So in the list “1,1,1,2,2,3” there are 3 distinct numbers (1,2,3) but only one unique number (3).