Trimming a custom field to a length

The excerpt is a specific field in WordPress and is wholly unrelated to custom fields, which is why the excerpt stuff you tried has no effect.

There is no built in way to trim custom fields, you have to do it manually with a bit of php:

$length = 20;
$text="Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Donec diam enim, egestas ut facilisis sit amet, semper sed turpis. Phasellus dolor nisl, pretium non imperdiet nec, cursus quis turpis. Duis sed lorem tortor, a gravida magna. Integer commodo cursus ante, non varius odio aliquam quis. Aenean tincidunt congue ultricies. Donec ut orci vel ante laoreet bibendum. Aliquam vitae erat arcu. Nam et mi nunc. Proin sed lorem ac odio vestibulum blandit sit amet id dolor. Sed in augue id massa feugiat convallis.";
$words = explode(' ', $text);
array_splice($words, $length);
$text = implode(' ', $words);
echo $text;

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