Retrieving part of a field.

Two questions on returning only part of a field;
1) Is there a switch or other devise to take the field {middle_name} and
return only the first letter? I have created a new field in Access that does
this, and I can just merge that, but I want to know if WORD is capable of
doing it instead.

2) I have an outline with the number format “First: Second: etc�. I also
have a cross-reference in the document to those numbers. Is there a way to
have the result not include the colon? ie. print all except the last
character “:�