Need Quick Macro Help!

Here is a picture for clarity:

http://www.freewebs.com/bxc2739/help.bmp

If possible I'd like to compare only the first character of each of the customer name fields.
Sometimes the customers go by acrynoms and sometimes the name is fully spelled out. So
to avoid a false negative it is more safe to search/filter by the first character of the beginning of the
word/name only. Does excel macro allow substring functionality? If I am to comparing the first char of the name
field of each sheet how to I access this, what is the syntax for accessing & comparing substring characters??

This shouldn't be too difficult (to use a marco to compare two fields at a time for matching) but I don't know
how to write the code.