Finding the 5 lowest values in a range?

Hi all,

I wonder if anybody could suggest a solution to a problem I have.

I have a range of numerical data in a single column and I want to identify the 5 lowest values.

Ideally I'm trying to achieve a formula along the lines of: IF x is one the 5 lowest values, true, otherwise false.

I'd previously done this using the RANK function and then a separate column referencing the rank values with a formula IF x<6.

This of course was fine until I started to generate duplicate values but the the values are no longer unique so ranks 1-5 may actually all be the same value.

In other words if my range consisted of:
2,2,5,5,5,7,7,8,13,56,78,98
I would want to isolate all those with a value of 2,5,7,8,13 (the 5 lowest).

I hope that's clear

Can anybody suggest a way of achieving this?

TIA

Have a look at this website

http://www.cpearson.com/excel/duplicat.htm

Go to 'Extracting Unique Entries' to see how to create a new column of unique entries. I would then use SMALL() to get each of the five lowest numbers

eg. SMALL(A:A,1), SMALL(A:A,2), SMALL(A:A,3), ..etc or SMALL(A:A,ROW(A1)) and copy it down for the next 4 cells.

Cheers!