This does it in Excel so it should work in Open Office, although that
doesn't mean that there isn't a better way to do it in OO. You'll need
to patch up the starting rows.
=CONCATENATE(LEFT(D1,4),LEFT(B1,2))
--rick
Mike Miller wrote:
> 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
>
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