Counting cells because of 4 same letters in the cell

Hey Guys,

I got a tricky problem which I cannot solve by myself. I got a table with entries in rows which start with 4 letters. The numbers of rows starting with the same letters varies. I need to know how much rows start with the same 4 letters. A my table contains over 500 rows it would be very handy if excel did it automatically. In my table the letters do not follow any logical algorythm - they are abbreviations.

WXYZ001	1	0	4
WXYZ002	2	6	0
ABCD001	1	1	0
ABCD002	2	5	2
ABCD003	4	5	7
ABCD004	2	3	5
ABCD005	3	4	6
HIJK001	1	2	5

This is what I would like to see:

WXYZ	2
ABCD	5
HIJK	1

Thanks in advance,
Greetings

Thank you for your quick replies!
Solution 1 gives me the right number for WXYZ but how do I get the others?
Solution 2 counts ever row - do I miss something? I use =COUNTIF(B$22:B$598,B602&"*") A in the Example is B in my real dataset.

Alright thanks for your offer - here is the workbook (only relevant cases)
countif problem.xlsx

Crazy but this sam formula pasted in cell D1 generates the numer 577 same when copying down + the 4 letters do not appear in column C.
Only difference to your formula is that I translate it as my Excel does not like english functions. Still the synthax should stay the same.
Anyway thanks for your efforts!

This is what I entered
=ZÄHLENWENN(A:A;C1&"*")
"Zählenwenn" is COUNTIF in German (by the way I would prefer using the english formula ) inside the brackets I had to change the , to a ; otherwise it does not accept the formula

Ok for the letters - i thought it would happen automatically (somehow...)
What do you mean by calculation set to automatic?

Ok, now I understand the Synthax!!!
Thanks to you all and sorry for my noobness!
Now it works!