How to truncate a row of multiple words

Hi all

As an exercise I am trying something out so as to learn more about Excel.

I have found out that using =LEFT(C1,5), in cell C1 will select the first five letters of the word in that cell.

In the attached Potholes file, under the header "Truncated Words" I have keyed in manually...

Speed Radar KA band

From the opposite cell " Speed Radar (10525 MHz X band; 24150 MHz Ka band) "

Is there a way say to use " Concatenate " along with something like " =LEFT(C9,4) " to selectively selected parts of words

Each line has many different words of different sizes.

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Thanks in advance if anyone has a formulae

Morning, Peter!

The same thing applies to this as your abbreviated words thread: you need to be able to explain the logic in the choice of words you are making. Remember that Excel is software that you have to programme, so it needs a set of rules to work by if you want it to do this sort of thing using a formula, or VBA, for that matter. Without a set of rules that you can explain, it's a non-starter. So, what's the logic in the sample?

Perhaps I should come at this from a slightly different angle. Do you have a list of long phrases that will always appear in the same format (same wording) that you always want to convert to a shorter version? If so, then you need to provide Excel with a dictionary of abbreviations (that is, a lookup table) to tell it what to do with each longer piece of text.

Yes, it is, and the answer remains the same. However, I am feeling particularly generous this morning, so instead of closing this thread, I am closing the earlier one, as it had gone rather off topic in places.

Peter - a gentle reminder, please, that the forum rules are very clear on thread duplication and the fact that it is not allowed. This has been raised with you before.

Here's some more information about the LEFT, MID, RIGHT and LEN functions in Excel: https://spreadsheeto.com/text-functions/

The other thread was not closed, Peter, but as we thought we had reached a resolution, you marked it as solved. You can always remove the solved tag and bump a thread by posting to it again.