Trying to use RANK function to parse unique text cells

[galadiman]

OK, so I have a master list of cells with text entries, some repeated.

I'd like to use RANK to get an order for the unique members of this master list, so I can later arrive at a list of only the unique members of this master list. I think I can do the latter part - how do you RANK the text cells?

(please note, many of the cells are identical up to 15th or 20th character, which might preclude jerry-rigging a solution involving ASCII values....)

Thanks for any help.

 

[goldfish]

I'm confused.... why do you want to rank text values? and in what way do you want to rank them? alphabetically? by length?

Is your only goal to look for unique values? I would then check out:
http://www.cpearson.com/excel/Duplicates.aspx
or
http://www.cpearson.com/excel/ListFunctions.aspx

HTH,
~Gold Fish

 

[galadiman]

Hmm, Those dont get me where I want to go, but they do indicate the difficulty of the question I have posed.

I was looking for a non-vba way to get from this:
a
b
b
a
c
d
e
f
f
g
g

to this:
a
b
c
d
e
f
g

... any ideas?

 

[galadiman]

But actually, the germane question was how to get from this:

a
b
b
a
c
d
e
f
f
g
g

to this:
1
2
2
1
3
4
5
6
6
7
7

 

[galadiman]

Reason: The list may be updated. So I need a way to add a member to the list and have the list automatically 'added-to' in the resulting range, but in alpha order...