but its going to take a few days or awhile for
me to digest the code you wrote down there ...

In the meantime, Im trying to break this problem into smaller
manageable portions and solve them one at a time baby steps.

My first stumbling block is the idea of how to repopulating a listbox.
Without doing any VBE coding yet and just trying to figure out how to
do this 'manually'. I create a custom filter to filter the records in
the datalist  to just show  the simulated starting  characters I want to
display. The datalist shows  the updated filtered list.

I expected the listbox (whose input is connected  to the datalist) to
automatically repopulate with the new updated list  but I was clearly
mistaken. The listbox did not repopulate with the new updated
filtered list and just kept the original list. What is the command or
steps to have a listbox repopulate?