Biff, Thanks for trying to help me. I've been scratching various
parts of my anatomy for some time over this. I'm glad someone has
finally come up with a solution.
Now need a little more help with the tweaking to get it to work in my
real worksheet. I've entered the following function in a sheet called
"Summary", all my data is in a sheet called "Attendance" . You will see
I've attempted to rewrite your function for this , but I'm still not
getting it right. Can you steer a rookie a little further? Thanks.

IF(ROWS($1:1)<=COUNTIF(Attendance!D$3:D$317,"Vac") ,Index(Attendance!B$3:B$317,SMALL(IF(Attendance!D$ 3:D$317="Vac",ROW(Attendance!A$2:A$8)-ROW(Attendance!A$2)+1),ROWS($1:1)))"")

When I go to implement this it returns an error and highlights the
double quotation marks at the very end.