Excel: Splitting Names

I've been working on a project that requires the manipulation of name data. A lot of the names were given as full names, some with multiple last names, that for the purposes of data manipulation had to be split. Here's the simple way to do it:

Assuming data is in A1 and the value of the cell is "Charles Kingsford Smith"

For First Name use:

=LEFT(A1,FIND(" ",A:A)-1)

for a resulting value of "Charles"

and for Last Name use:

=MID(A1,FIND(" ",A1)+1,LEN(A1))

for a resulting value of "Kingsford Smith"

Sawmill Report Analyser

I have discovered today that Sawmill is a really cool tool for slicing and dicing data to produce useful analytical reporting information. Well worth a look if you want to produce reports from logged data from Proxies, RADIUS servers, Firewalls, Mail Server logs... you name it.

It has a bunch of preconfigured plug-ins for just about everything, will munch just about any log file you throw at it with quite reasonable performance and is very versatile in its configurability. Pretty cheap too!

I've known about the tool for a while, but never had a reall good play with it until today.

Disclaimer: I am in no way affiliated with Sawmill.