Episode 5: TEXTSPLIT - Quick Data Cleanup - Baskerville Drummond Consulting LLP

Modern Excel for Professional Services: 5 Functions Changing How We Work

Excel underpins daily operations in legal firms.

It supports billing analysis, WIP reviews, forecasting and partner reporting. Yet many teams still rely on legacy formulas and manual fixes that introduce risk.

Excel has moved on. Modern functions deliver stronger accuracy, clearer structure and better auditability. When used well, they improve control and confidence.

This series explores five functions that are reshaping how legal teams manage data. Each episode explains what the function does, why it matters and how it applies in practice.

Finally, we turn to TEXTSPLIT — and how legal teams can clean and structure messy data in seconds.

Split text instantly, no extra steps

Messy data is a common challenge in legal environments. Exports from practice management systems, billing platforms, and case tools rarely arrive in a clean, analysis-ready format.

Names combined in one cell.
Codes grouped together.
Comma-separated fields that need separating before they can be used.

Traditionally, this meant:

Text to Columns
Complex formulas
Or manual rework

episode-5-textsplit-quick-data-cleanup-1

TEXTSPLIT simplifies all of this.

This instantly separates text into individual components based on a chosen delimiter (in this case, a hyphen).

episode-5-textsplit-quick-data-cleanup-2

Why this matters for legal teams

Legal operations and finance teams regularly work with:

Client and matter exports
Billing data
Time recording reports
External system downloads

Using TEXTSPLIT helps by:

✔ Reducing manual data preparation
✔ Improving accuracy when restructuring data
✔ Saving time on repetitive cleanup tasks
✔ Making downstream analysis far more efficient

Practical legal applications

Splitting first and last names
Separating matter codes or references
Cleaning exported billing narratives
Preparing data for reporting and dashboards

At Baskerville Drummond LLP, we often see that the biggest inefficiencies in reporting start with data preparation.

Functions like TEXTSPLIT remove that friction – allowing teams to focus on analysis rather than formatting.

Martin Batt

07854 740 686

More in this series

Episode 4: LAMBDA – Build your own Excel functions

Modern Excel for Professional Services: 5 Functions Changing How We Work Excel underpins daily operations in legal firms. It supports billing analysis, WIP reviews, forecasting and partner reporting. Yet many teams still rely on legacy formulas and manual fixes that...

Episode 3: LET – Cleaner Formulas, Faster Sheets

Episode 2: FILTER – Stop Copying and Pasting Data

Episode 1: XLOOKUP – Why VLOOKUP is officially retired

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