Here are two possible ways
=MAX(--(A1:A10="john")*B1:B10) must be entered as an array formula with
Shift+Ctrl+Enter
and
=SUMPRODUCT(MAX(--(A1:A10="john"),B1:B10))
completed with simple Enter

best wishes
Bernard V Liengme
www.stfx.ca/people/bliengme
remove caps from email

"David Burr" wrote in message
...
Imagine I have two columns, e.g. a name and a date. There
can be multiple entries for the same name with different
dates associated with them.

I want to return the maximum date associated with a
particular name.

The easy way to solve this would be with DMAX. However I
don't like the fact that that requires me to store the
search criteria in a separate range as there will be a
number of different criteria for different statistics and
it's going to get very messy. Is there a way to achieve
this with the criteria inline?

I have been playing with sumproduct and max but that
doesn't look like being the answer.

Many thanks


David