I personally have used the ranking functions quite a bit lately not to just remove duplicates but to be able to qualify what is removed. In one case, I needed to qualify one field based on the number of characters in a column and look at another column that may have one of two choices in it - "Reject" or "Reschedule". In this case, Reject weighed more than Reschedule. The ranking of both of the columns was added together to come up with the total ranking. Then all of the rows that were not the highest rank [based on a single column] were removed.