title: Excel formula: picking a value from a table/array of non-unique values
body: <p>OK, so here's the problem that's got me stumped in Excel. I have three columns:</p>
  <pre><code>date    value   fruit
  5-Jan   19  apple
  5-Jan   2   banana
  6-Jan   8   grapefruit
  6-Jan   2   lemon
  6-Jan   14  orange
  5-Jan   8   peach
  1-Jan   14  pear
  6-Jan   4   starfruit
  10-Jan  3   strawberry
  </code></pre>
  <p>The data is not sorted in any way. The dates, values, and fruits are non-unique.</p>
  <p>I'm going to copy and paste the date values into the first column of another table, and remove duplicates.  I need a formula to paste into the second column of that table that will, for each date, identify the fruit with the highest value.</p>
  <p>Here's the expected outcome from that formula.</p>
  <pre><code>date    fruit
  1-Jan   pear
  5-Jan   apple
  6-Jan   orange
  10-Jan  strawberry
  </code></pre>
  <p>I've been playing around with index/match, vlookup, arrays (which baffle me), and I'm stumped.</p>
  <p>Ideas?  Much thanks!</p>