Rank by value and date?

Does anyone know how to rank a list by a number and date simultaneously with a formula thus eliminating duplicate rankings? I tried some things like ranking separately then adding the two rank values but the values I get with the dates don't seem to work very well. Could sort but want to keep the same chronological order and highlight the lower ranked rows with conditional formatting. If I have three values at 9 and the formatting threshold is 10, I get 11 rows highlighed.

It's not clear to me exactly what you want to do, do you want to rank a column of numbers but separate ties by reference to a date in another column (or is it the other way around)?

A realtively simple way to do that is to create a helper column which adds a small fraction of your secondary rank criterion to your primary rank criterion

e.g if you are ranking by an integer in column B but want to separate ties by perferring the one with a later date in column A then you could use a formula like this in a helper column

=B2+A2/100000

then you use a rank function on the helper column.....

Does this help?

I tried that before but apparently I messed it up some way. Works great!

Thanks a bunch!!