This is the kind of real-world puzzle that reveals exactly where traditional spreadsheets fail you. The problem, splitting a single row into multiple rows when one column holds two values, is deceptively simple, and the fact that it requires wrestling with LET, arrays, and stacked filters tells us something important: the tools we've relied on for decades were never designed for the data we actually work with. Our take is that this user's frustration isn't a sign of a bad approach; it's a sign of a tool that stopped evolving.
Let's be clear about what's happening here. A user has a column that contains multiple time ranges in one cell, a perfectly natural way to record overlapping or consecutive events. But the spreadsheet expects one value per cell, one row per record. So the user is forced to reverse-engineer a solution: manually split the string, create parallel arrays, stack them, filter out blanks. It works, but it shouldn't require that level of gymnastics for a task that's fundamentally about restructuring information. The real question isn't "how do I make this work in a spreadsheet?" It's "why does my tool make me think like a programmer just to clean up my own data?"
This is where an AI-native approach changes the equation. Instead of asking the user to master arcane functions like LET or TEXTSPLIT, the tool should understand the intent: *I have multiple values in one cell, and I need each value to become its own row.* That's a semantic operation, not a formulaic one. When the tool can recognize patterns, like time ranges separated by spaces, or lists separated by commas, it can offer to expand the row automatically. The user shouldn't have to build the scaffolding; they should just describe what they want.
The practical takeaway for anyone reading this is straightforward: if you're spending time on workarounds like these, you're not being lazy or unskilled. You're being held back by a tool that treats data like a grid of static cells rather than a flexible, living structure. The next generation of spreadsheets will let you say "split this row by each time range" and get the result instantly. Until then, the cleanest approach is to use a helper column with TEXTSPLIT and TOCOL, or a simple Power Query unpivot. But don't mistake the workaround for the solution. The solution is a tool that listens to what you actually need to do, and then does it.