On Friday, April 10, 2015 at 1:15:45 PM UTC-4, isabelle wrote:
on a new sheet,
select the range A1:A10
paste this formula in range A1

=SMALL((name1;name2;name3;name4;name5;name6;name7; name8;name9;name10);ROW())
it is an array formula to insert with CTRL+Shift+Enter

isabelle

Thanks. That sorts the date data without any UDF but I now need the name of each of those named ranges returned in the next column based on the sort. If the dates were unique I could easily do a lookup but there may be duplicate dates.

That is why I was leaning towards the UDF that could somehow sort the date-name pairs and return a sorted array.