Hi Joe,
You are better off sticking with the newsgroups if you
want an answer in a reasonable time. Email may
be ignored (or set aside). Emailing someone
who can't answer a question can be embarrassing.
That said some of my most constructive work has
been in answering someone when they emailed me
or mentioned my name (putting me on the spot) -- but
those are the exceptions, probably more get ignored
because, I pay much more attention to newsgroups.
You realize also that in the newsgroups you can
post a question, and go to bed, and perhaps have the
answer you wanted in the morning from someone on
the other side of the world. Or someone in the next
town state (or country) who got up or stayed up late.
The best thing to do is to learn to use the search
engines. There are few questions that haven't been
answered before, or can't be constructed from a few
previous answers.
http://www.mvps.org/dmcritchie/excel/xlnews.htm