yogi_Group Data By First Letter of Entity In Column A And Compute Group SUMs From Column B

Yogi Anand, D.Eng, P.E.      Google Spreadsheet   Post  #796  Oct 09, 2012    www.energyefficientbuild.com.

user yhi said: (http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!category-topic/docs/spreadsheets/3GtJ1erFU1E)
need to group data based on first symbol in 'col1' and sum values in 'col2' 
hi all,

have a table:

---------------
col1 | col2
---------------
abc | 5

bca | 4
adf | 2

---------------

need to group data based on first symbol in 'col1' and sum values in 'col2' with output:

---------------
col1 | col2
---------------
a | 7

b | 4
---------------

the only way I see is creating a table with new column with =Left(Col1) and than running a query on that. Wonder if there is a way to do it with on function (expression). 

thank you

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following is a solution to the problem ... believing that the data will continually grow