Student class enrollment with table

To track student class enrollment when classes may appear in any order, you can create a table with additional columns, one for each class, to mark and count enrollment. In the example shown, the formula in G6 is:

=IF(COUNTIF($C6:$F6,G$5),"x","")

Once you have classes marked, you can turn enable an autofilter and then filter on each class as needed to list enrolled students.

Explanation

Note the purpose of this example is to how one way to "normalize" data when the order of values is random. There are many ways to approach this problem.

The formula in G6 relies on the COUNTIF function to count the presence of a given class (i.e. "math", art", etc.) in a columns C through F:

=IF(COUNTIF($C6:$F6,G$5),"x","")

Class names are pulled from row 5, and references are mixed to allow the formula to be copied across and down the table.

When COUNTIF finds a class in the range, it returns a positive number . The IF function will evaluate any positive result as TRUE and return "x". If a class isn't found, COUNTIF will return zero and IF will return an empty string ("").