If Janet in not in the cell and it is just De Vries
then you can use

B1: De Vries
C1: Janet
D1: =UPPER(LEFT(SUBSTITUTE(B1," ",""),3) & left(C1,2))

If they are all in one cell what if you had "Nancy Jo Cotton"
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HTH,
David McRitchie, Microsoft MVP - Excel [site changed Nov. 2001]
My Excel Pages: http://www.mvps.org/dmcritchie/excel/excel.htm
Search Page: http://www.mvps.org/dmcritchie/excel/search.htm

"Heather Tavitian" <Heather wrote in message
...
In Excel is there a SHFT command that can remove spaces between words.
I need to concatenate the left four letters of the family name with the left
two letters of the first name to achieve an individual code of six letters.
However, some family names have a space. eg: De Vries Van Housten.
I need to "Shift" the letters to the left to remove the space so that

Janet De Vries becomes DEVRJA, not (as I'm getting) DE VJA

Help me, I have a lot of these to do!
Heather