Excel lookup data and find top 3 items

Question

I can't figure out which formulas I can use for the following issue:

How can I look up the top three items from the list with Occurrence?

Answer 1

actually the #N/As aren't too much of a problem.....try this formula in C2

=INDEX(A$2:A$15,MATCH(1,(B$2:B$15=LARGE(IF(COUNTIF(C$1:C1,A$2:A$15)=0,B$2:B$15),1))*(COUNTIF(C$1:C1,A$2:A$15)=0),0))

confirmed with CTRL+SHIFT+ENTER and copied down to C4

That will even cope if you have different items with the same number of occurrences......

If there are fewer than 3 different items then you will get #N/A errors - you could eliminate those by using IFERROR function in Excel 2007 or later