How to "productPrecis" for descriptions in admin?

[Chargin]

I doing a pricelist mod for a store so they can print out a list of products from the admin.

We want to just have the first 100 or so letters of the description on the list.

Using this

<td align="left" class="<?php echo $cellColor; ?>"><span class="copyText" ><?php echo $results[$i]['name']; ?></span> <span class="copyText"><?php echo $results[$i]['description']; ?></span></td>

Gives me the entire description. How do I limit the text displayed?

Viewcat.tpl uses {TXT_DESC} which uses the productprecis thing, but {TXT_DESC} wont work in admin, admin uses different include files or something??

Im doing all this to the update.inc.php file (mass update mod by akumanz) but I believe the file is very similar to index.inc.php so Im sure someone here would be able to understand my question.