Thanks for the tips. And especially thanks for the encouraging words. It seems to be time for me to buckle down and muddle through...

Where do you start? I used to consider myself highly qualified with C, Assembler, C++ etc, but that was like 10 years ago. My last IDE was MS VC6. Then I became a designer/algorithmeter. Now, my office is being shut down. Where do I go to get started programming again? I have still don't know what .NET really means. REALLY!

As I recall a small Lotus123 style spreadsheet was a class project in CS302 Assembly Language Programming (1987 SIU-Carbondale). Of course it was on a much smaller scale and not nearly so pretty, but it was an assembly language spreadsheet for 3rd year undergrads.