Counting the individual words using index

[Mike2003]

Hello,

I am having trouble in getting FM5.5 to count the individual words in a field for a number of records, ie:

If I have a field called colours and the first four records looked like this....

Red, Blue, Green, Grey

Red

Red

Purple, Green, Brown

Now if I use the "Index" function I get a list of all the individual words and I can get a field count for each record but what I need is how many times each word appears even separated by a comma.

Therefore, I would like to do is count each of the words that appear so that I get something that looks like this:

Red 3

Blue 1

Green 2

Grey 1

Purple 1

Brown 1

Any help would be greatly appreciated

Thank you

[Vaughan]

Put the individual colours into related fields (through a portal) so each related record has one colour entry, then make a summary report to get the totals out.

It can be done with multiple values in a field (as you have above) but the calculations needed to get the numbers out are ugly, partly because the names of the colours need to be hard-coded. You might also need one calc field per colour, which means adding colors is major surgery.

[Mike2003]

Thanks for your help Vaughan ,

I used colours as an example, two date I have created a field that stores a variety of names, some being one offs but the majority are in comma separated lines. To date for instance I have 3200 separate records with a large variety names. The names are related to photographs in each record, thus containging more than one name sometimes.

I had hoped this would be relatively simple, as I can get a list real easy using the index mode and was hoping FileMaker had a command that would return the result with a quick formula.

Michael