HELP: is there a compare function??

[AE]

Hi there.
I would like some help in building a spreadsheet up....

what I would like to do is have 2 columns (A&B)

Column A will be called CATALOG NUMBER
Column B will be called PRODUCT FAMILY

I would like to manually enter a catalog number in column A and have
Excel to display the product family it belongs to automatically on
column B.

is it possible? how?

I have between 10-15 product families (ie: screws, connectors,
rawstock, etc)
each product family has 5 to 20 possible combinations ("prefixes") -
only the first 4 letters will define the product family, the rest will
be a numeric secuencial code-

for example the following numbers could be screws:
ABCD001
ABCD099
ACBD001
ACBD099
CDBA234
etc...


the following could be connectors (preffixes like XXZZ, XZXZ, XYZX)
XXZZ001
XZXZ999
XYZX001
etc...

Advice is needed, please help me complete this spreadsheet,
I've used Excel only for its basic (and I mean really basic) functions.

Thanks in advance.

[mrice]

Have a look at the VLOOKUP function in Help.