Excel in DSUM, DAVERAGE etc. will produce erroneous results

[lwolv]

I have a spreadsheet that has a list of colleges and universities and data
from each. When I use the database functions I get erroneous results--both
in Excel 2003 and 2007. For example, consider the list:
Texas
Texas A&M
Texas Christian
Texas Tech
Texas Western University
When I do a DSUM, for example, on Texas as the criterion, I get
information for all four Texas universities. When I do a DAVERAGE on Texas
A&M, I just get Texas A&M's results. It appears that the DAVERAGE, etc.,
functions consider Texas identical to Texas A&M, Texas Christian, Texas Tech
and Texas Western University if the first five or six letters are the same as
Texas. [Why don't they put cell word length as criteria in their database
functions?]
Of course, one could put an underscores after Texas in the last entries,
but that is tedious if an original list is being used to copy into a column
on, say, a weekly basis.
The problem, of course, is that I and probably other users of the
database functions may not notice the erroneous calculations, leading to some
serious results.