VLookup - find highest Value...

Hi All, I was hoping someone could help me out with this one. I'm not sure that a form of Vlookup would be correct or not but here it goes...

I'm using a vlookup of account numbers to find a date. Problem is, some account numbers have multiple dates, so there are multiple entries. Right now, my Vlookup will pick up the first date in the list, but I need it to pick up the most recent date. Any ideas?

For example
Account Date
1001 1/2/2008
2001 1/5/2008
3001 1/7/2008
2001 1/9/2008
2001 1/12/2008
4001 1/23/2008

so if I lookup account number 2001, it will return 1/5/2008 but I want it to return 1/12/2008.

Thanks in advance,

Jason

thanks - is there anyway this can be done without an array formula? I have many rows of data and these type of formula tend to really slow down my spreadsheets.

Thanks again for your quick reply.

thanks again - very helpful. Hope you don't mind my persistence but promise this will be my last question... often time my data will get filtered and sorted, so the last entry is not neccessarily the most recent date. I suppose I could filter every time so that this will work, but is there a way to modify the non array formula so it will return the Max date (or the most recent) instead of the last date in the list?

Jason