Signup exports often arrive as a bare list of addresses. The name is technically in there, but every company encodes it differently. One uses jane.smith@, the next uses jsmith@, the third uses smith.j@.
A formula can chop the address apart. It cannot work out which half was the first name.
The Old Way (LEFT, FIND, and PROPER)
Step one is taking everything before the at sign.
=LEFT(A2, FIND("@", A2) - 1)That gives you jane.smith, which is not a name yet. So you replace the separators and fix the casing.
=PROPER(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(LEFT(A2, FIND("@", A2) - 1), ".", " "), "_", " "))Now the failures start. jsmith@ becomes "Jsmith". smith.j@ becomes "Smith J", with the names reversed. jane.smith+news@ keeps the tag. info@ and sales@ become "Info" and "Sales" and go straight into your greeting line. PROPER also turns mcdonald into "Mcdonald" and oconnor into "Oconnor".
The FITS Way (Just Ask)
With FITS, you describe the output you want, including what should happen to the addresses that are not people.
=FITS("Return only the person's first name from this email address, properly capitalized. If it is a role address like info or sales, return blank: " & A2)jane.smith@acme.com returns Jane. jsmith@acme.com returns Jane where the initial is unambiguous and the surname is clear. smith.j@acme.com is not read backwards. mcdonald@ comes back as McDonald because the model knows how the name is written.
Ask for the full name and you get both parts in one pass.
=FITS("Return the full name in First Last order from this email address, or blank if it is not a personal address: " & A2)One column, one sentence, and no separate branch for each naming convention in the list.
When to Use Each
If your whole list comes from one company with one convention, LEFT and PROPER will do. Reach for =FITS() when the list spans many domains, when role addresses need filtering out, or when the greeting is going in front of a customer. The related jobs use the same pattern: extracting the email address itself out of messy text, separating first and last names once you have a name column, and extracting the domain when you want the company instead of the person. For the full picture, read the guide to automating Google Sheets tasks you used to need regex for.
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