Getting the first Character of a String (2000)

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Thanks for your help on my Range() dilemma. Now a (hopefully) easy question:

How do I truncate a string to get only the first character?

For example, I want the string

1. John Doe

to become

1

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enter the following formula in the desired cell.
=LEFT(A1,1)

A1 is the cell with the data you would like to hack and 1 being the character to leave intact.

or with VBA you could try Range(“A1″) .Formula =”=LEFT(Cell,1)”

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If your string is in A1, then =Left(A1,1) should work.

In VBA you can use a similar construct with Left(strExpression,1) where strExpression is the string you wnat to work with.

Andrew C

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The cell formula is =left(string,num_of_characters) to return a string starting from the left.
e.g. LEFT(“Hello world”,1) returns “H”
LEFT(“Hello world”,3) returns “Hel”
If num_of_characters is omitted it is assumed to be 1.

The VBA formula is the same but if the number is omitted you get a zero length string, “”

Ewan.

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