Hi again, I want to check a series for ties, meaning exact values that occur more than once in the series, and also get the respective counts of how many occurrences there are at each of these ties. The function values() gives me information about the ties, as it drops repeated values. But it seems it doesn't have the counts. The function aggregate() is very general, and so I think for a series y I could do: matrix m = aggregate(y, y, mean) Here the "mean" thing is just a redundant dummy entry, it could be anything from the allowed functions (see the doc for 'aggregate'). Another redundancy is the double entry of "y", the first "y" could also be any other existing series, it's just needed to satisfy the number (and position!) of arguments. Then what I want to use are the first 2 cols of m: m[, 1:2]. So, is there a more elegant but still readable way to get the first two columns of: aggregate(<anyseries>, y, <anyfunction>) Thanks, sven