Thank You David, you just made my life easier.

Nick



>Nick,
>
>If you are guaranteed that the first letter of each word is capitalized this would be faster than the other solutions:
>
>

acronym = chrtran( TheString, "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz ", "" )

>
>And if you don't already have all uppercase first letters:
>
>

acronym = chrtran( proper( TheString ), "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz ", "" )

>
>>I am trying to pick out first character in a string for example:
>>
>>Chief Probation Officer
>>
>>I need to return
>>
>>CPO
>>
>>
>>I there a quick way of doing this, I will need to perform this operation on hundreds of strings. If there is no straight forward way of doing this then do I put each character in an array and search the array ?