Need complete answers

I am still a newbie on the AS400 (working on it for a little over a year) and 
am frustrated with getting certain things to work, specifically transfers and 
connections. I think some of it has to do with a lack of education, so can 
someone point me in the right direction, classes, conferences, books, whatever, 
that can help in these areas. I have some books, but there always seems to be a 
gap somewhere:

- FTPing data from the AS400. How to add carriage controls and line feeds to 
the end of the data, or other FTP options/formats
- moving EXCEL spreadsheets up to an AS400 data file "easily", or downloading a 
file to EXCEL. Client access express plug-ins does not seem to support EXCEL 
2000
- accessing the QDLS directories from within Windows Neighborhood after moving 
to CAE. I've tried a ton of different trouble-shooting tasks but to no avail.

Any help is appreciated.
Thanks.
Dave