Google Sheets custom formatting text mask

Question

Is there any way to define custom text formatting, such that you can have a cell containing a string, but what's shown is a subset of that string?

In this example, I have a cell (A1) containing a name and in B1 I can define a regexp formula that extracts the first letter of each word -> the initials.

But what I want is to define a custom format so that I only need the one column (A) and if I click on a cell in A to edit it I'll see the full name string, but when I leave the cell it just displays the initials.

I know this is more complex, but like when you enter to have a cell with 5.51386 and set the custom format of #,##0.00 you see 5.51 but the full data is still held in the cell.

Answer 1

This is not possible in Google Sheets as you imagine it. internal cell formatting is not so complex to be able to handle such tasks. best you can have is the ARRAYFORMULA for the whole range and hidden column