Well, on Solaris I just go:

/usr/ucb/ps -auxwwe | grep PASSWORD

and I'll get it ;)

"e" dumps the environment.
"ww" is "weally wide" (to quote elmer fudd)

I'll respond to part two of this first.

I'm one person. I have taken an average of 18 questions a day, every day since Jan 1, 2000. Not just business days -- every day. That is well over 15,000 questions so far. I'm just one person -- there are LOTS of resources out there. I might suggest that:

a) the USENET newsgroups, freely available from www.google.com, are a great resource. I can be found there, as well as many other extremely knowledgable people -- all willing to try and help you.

b) </code> http://otn.oracle.com/ <code>has discussion groups where other Oracle developers hang out. Great place to post a question and get an answer (and maybe even answer a question or two yourself)

c) search works really well. A search for excel on this site returned subjects like:

"Automate loading of data from Excel spreadsheets into database"
"Storing & Retrieving Excel Spreadsheet in DB"
"How to import data from more than one (.csv ) [Excel] files into the related tables !"


for example. In your case, I might

1) save the excel data as CSV (comma separated values)
2) use sqlldr to load it (the csv file)

oh, that is funny.

you have to

a) open it in excel, they know how to read their file format.
b) file save as
c) choose file type "csv"


would it not be cool if simply renaming a file changed its format...