Extract characters from a cell

[JBasch]

I am trying to extra to extract certain characters from a cell. I know
this should be easy, but I am having a lot of trouble figuring out how.
Each cell has a different amount of characters, and I want the 1st
character and the 5th character from the end. Here are a couple
examples:

dinosaur -- do
minneapolis -- mp

Please help,
Thanks

 

[Bernie Deitrick]

JB,

=LEFT(A1,1) & MID(A1,LEN(A1)-4,1)

HTH,
Bernie
MS Excel MVP

 

[MarkN]

I think that this will do the trick:
=LEFT(A1,1)&LEFT(RIGHT(A1,5),1)