Question : WSS 3.0 List Permissions

I have inherited SharePoint Administration duties for a new SharePoint server.  I am still learning the ropes on SharePoint and I need help on an Employee List.  Our intranet site has a main teamsite section with many subsites for various IT projects.  On the main site, a list was started with all of the employee data.  Currently every employee has Contribute access to this list in order to keep their data current.  The problem is that they have access to ALL the data.  How can I set up permissions such that each employee can only access their own data?  Is there a way to have multiple permissions within the list to do that instead of the general permission for the entire list?

If using something like SharePoint Designer is in order, I have just begun to learn that tool, so I would appreciate detailed instructions or a good suggestion for learning the basics of the tool.

Thanks for the help!

Answer : WSS 3.0 List Permissions

Dave,
I hope you have a employee field in your List which is of type "Person". Now you can create a standard View from your Settings page. In "Filter" section you will see Show items only when the following is true:  Show the items when column : choose "Employee" Field "is equal to" and type the value as "[Me]". This way the items will be displayed where employee field = [Me] which will be the logged in user account. So this is not dependent on the created user. Make this view as the default view.
Only issue with Views is you cannot set permissions for Views in Sharepoint which is a big drawback. So users will have access to even "All items" view where they can see all items also. One option is you can delete the "All items" view and just have the Employee View.
Or other option is to go for Content Query web parts instead of Views. In content query web also you can define filters.
See what suits you best.

RJ