On Thu, 20 Apr 2006, Raymond Norton wrote: > I know this is off topic, but I need to import a few hundred names into > a program. I need a formula in Calc that will take the first three > letters of all cells in column 4, and the first two letters of all cells > in column 2, and produce the output in a third column. It really *must* be in Calc? If so, I don't know the answer, but if you can make a tab-delimited text file and process that, this ought to work: perl -pe 's/^([^\t]+[\t])(..)([^\t]+[\t]){2}(...)/$4$2/' infile > outfile But that assumes that there are always more than two letters in column 2 and more than four letters in column 4. It would not be very hard to make it more general if necessary. Mike