Select First 7 Letters From A Cell

I have some code that loops through a sheet exporting each row to it's own file. The code below is the part that writes the file. The variable "i" is used to count which row the loop is on. I had planned to use the text in the first cell to identify the files, but the problem is that it contains some characters that cannot be used in Windows file names. So what I had hoped to accomplish was to just use the first 7 letters from each cell in column "a" in the filename. how to modify this to only take the first 7 letters from the cell instead of the entire cell contents? Set a = fs.CreateTextFile(DestFile & Cells(i, 1).Text, True)