Padding a word with spaces to fill a cell

Question

Is it possible to pad a cell with spaces to ensure that it is the correct length?

Here's an example with * representing spaces.

Input    Output
-----    ------
red      red**
blue     blue*

The words are padded with spaces to ensure the cell content is 5 characters long.

Answer 1

Try this:

=LEFT(A1&"*****",5)

We are adding lots of stars(*) then just cutting from left 5 characters.

Answer 2

As per suggested comment:

=LEFT(A1 & REPT("*",5),5)

original:

=A1 & REPT("*",5-len(A1))

main advantage being that you can pass the length and the pad character as a cell reference, and easily update