Format To Display Set Text Length

I'm trying to avoid using merged cells or text wrapping with altered row height to display some text in multiple rows - similar to using centre across selection to have a header across multiple columns without merging. The guys that use the sheet type a comment that is relevant to five rows and the easy solution here would be to just type the first portion of the comment in the first row (about 30 characters will display in the column width available), then put the next 30 characters in the next row and so on but the guys keep getting lazy and merging the cells so they can type the comments more easily. I can lock the sheet or force validation but I think there's a better solution.

I can effectively "wrap" the text across the five rows the header is relevant to by using a formula to pick up everything except the first 30 characters of each cell. Ie if they type whatever they want in cell B16 then I can use this formula to break it in to 30 character lengths to "wrap" it in to the next four rows:

=IF(LEN(B17)>30,RIGHT(B17,(LEN(B17)-30)),""),

And I'm sure it would be easy enough to use search with the formula to break it where there is a space in the text so partial words don't flow over.

BUT because the text ends up slightly different widths I want to use formats to force only 30 characters to display (whilst keeping the remainder of the text string intact). I can't figure out the syntax to format only 30 text characters to display but you can easily do it with numbers and dates and so on.