Computing Background

Yup, that's about the extent of my programming expertise.................
My computing skills are currently limited to Microsoft's offerings (I know that it's what you Unix users want to hear!). What's on offer at the moment is as follows
Excel (I pretty much spent my last 3 years glued to it), Word etc.
"Other"
Rudimentary HTML (more on that soon)
Emacs (at least I'm not calling it emax anymore)
Some databases used in the world of corporate finance to try and eke out value-added ideas. e.g. Bondware, SDC Platinum, DataStream. Needless to say, it was all front end usage