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Right, now I can open stuff, I can see what those abbreviations were again :)

Anyone have any idea what 'ODBC' is and how I'd go about handling it? (or 'ADO', but I haven't heard of that before.) I think what I want to do atm is basically feed an Access table with the data being offered, 'cos it's fairly easy to make a nice query interface with Access. (I can get the data out into a text file, tab-seperated fields and double-newline-seperated records, but that doesn't look as friendly for what I want now.)

As for this morning, that'll have to wait until after lunch...

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ODBC = Open DataBase Connectivity, ADO = Active Data Objects.
How you'd use them depends on which language you're trying to do so from. I'm not well versed in either (I have a couple of apps at work that use ADO but they do so through a wrapper someone else there wrote).
If you're trying to use Access, I think using ADO from a language that supports COM well would be easiest (Python, VB).

Uhm...

what it's offering is these options 'DB through ODBC' and 'DB through ADO', with a box that says 'command'. it's not a case of writing something.

but I guess I'll look into it on my own some more.

I think what you're saying is you want to use Access as a front end onto another database, is that right? ODBC and ADO are just standards for connecting to a database (in a Microsoft kind of way), so it's asking how to connect to which database you want.

I don't know about ADO, but most databases should have ODBC drivers with them. Once you've installed the one for the database you're using, you should have an entry in the Control Panel called 'ODBC Data Sources'. You can use that to set up names for the databases you want to use, and then Access should let you specify one of those.

Sorry if this is a bit vague, it's been a while since I've used these things...

I don't really know *what* it means. I messed with it for a while, then gave up in disgust when I worked out that Access could parse text files helpfully.