Excel 2007 : Can a cell formula identify a row by the first character in a specific cell?

I need to be able to create a formula that will help me identify cells by what they start with. Here are the details.

In column A, the data in each cell will always begin with either an "N", "C", "D" or "F" and be followed by 6 numbers (eg. C928712). I need to perform different acctions for each row depending on what the first letter of cells in Column A are. I have been sorting them and then manually impacting the data, but it is becomming an excessive time constraint. Is there any way to accomplish this? Is it possible to do something like an IF statement?

=IF(A2 'starts with' C,f2,"")

looking for suggestions and any help I can get. Follow-up questions are welcome to get to a solution.

Thanks.

Hello,

the Left() function can be useful here

=IF(left(A2,1)="C",f2,"")

cheers,