At the end of last school year I was working with a client that had a project in which he had used google forms to collect the data on a "Mostest Awards" for seniors. He had 36 categories and had it separated by boys and girls. There were well over 100 total students, so the collating of the data was tedious and he needed a way to summarize the data quickly and easily.

Our first approach was to build a pivot table for each category, then build a summary page with the results from 72 (boys and girls) pivot tables. While this worked, I wanted a more streamlined solution. With this spreadsheet, all the data summary is done on a single sheet, by category, by gender, using the following formula. This formula selects the data by column, counts the number of results for each student, orders the results descending, and limits to the top four vote getters.

=transpose(query(index(if({1,1},boys!$A$1:$A)),"select Col1,count(Col2) where Col1<>'' group by Col1 order by count(Col2) desc limit 4 label count(Col2) '#'"))