There's a quiet kind of pain in watching someone try to remember the exact function that used to do the heavy lifting before Textsplit came along. The user's example, that jumble of brackets and quoted delimiters, is a relic of a time when splitting text meant wrestling with syntax instead of simply telling the tool what you needed. And the fact that they can't recall the name isn't a failure of memory. It's a sign of how far the experience has moved past the point where that kind of mental gymnastics should be necessary.
What they're circling is the shift from "sourcing text into columns" to actually splitting it. The older approach was less about splitting and more about extracting, pulling pieces from a cell into separate places based on rules you had to type out by hand. It worked, but it asked you to think like a parser. You had to know the delimiters in advance, structure the formula just right, and accept that any variation in the data would break the whole thing. That wasn't a tool designed for exploration. It was a tool designed for people who already knew exactly what they were looking for.
Textsplit changes the relationship. You don't have to remember a function name or reconstruct a formula from memory. You just point at the cell, tell it where to break, and move on. That's not a small quality-of-life improvement. It's the difference between spending your energy on the mechanics of data preparation and spending it on the questions that actually matter. The original poster's frustration isn't about a forgotten formula. It's about the fact that the old way forced you to carry all the complexity in your head, and the moment you stopped using it daily, the details vanished.
For anyone still relying on those older methods, the takeaway is straightforward: the barrier wasn't your ability, it was the tool. The reason Textsplit feels like a relief isn't that it's flashy. It's that it removes the cognitive overhead that used to come standard with every parsing task. You no longer need to remember the incantation. You just need to know what you want out of the data, which is how it should have been all along. The next time you're about to type a formula that looks like a keyboard accident, pause and ask whether you're solving the problem or just translating it. The answer will tell you which tool you're really using.