excel and column headers

After a crash on my m/c and losing a lot of data, I decided to re-design my bank and credit card worksheets, making them easier to read and generally tidier. My problem is that I want to leave row 1 and column A blank. I want to put my column headers in row 2, leave row three blank, freeze the frames and enter data starting at row 5. I can do this, but I often have to sort the data by date, and because my headers are not in the top row, they are being sorted with the data and the spaces are also getting sorted and put at the end. Is there a way to get Excel(2002) to ignore the blank rows I want it to, and read the row I am using as the header as the header?
As you can see, this is a 10 drink headache for me!!!!
thanx in advance.
by the way, I am not conversant with vba and macro's, so if this is the only solution I would need an A to Z guide.