Skip the RANK function and try this, instead:

With
A1:100
A2: 75
A3:100
A4: 75
A5: 50

And
C1: 1
C2: 2
C3: 3
C4: 4
C5: 5

Then
D1: =LARGE($A$1:$A$5,C1)
Copy D1 down through D5

In this example, the Col_D formula return
100
100
75
75
50

Does that help?
***********
Regards,
Ron

XL2002, WinXP


"rockhammer" wrote:

I have a table in which one column (say A) contains unsorted numeric values
and another column (say B) contains the values returned by =rank() based on
those numeric values.

In cases where those numeric values in col A are not unique, the ranks in
column B will contain duplicates as well.

I want to find a way to extract the top ranking n numeric values and the
bottom ranking m numeric values WITHOUT HAVING TO SORT THE TABLE.

Is there an (easy) way to do that?

Thanks.