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