No, you don't have to write a macro. I guess you're refering to the shipping example that uses DDE. Instead of DDE, you can use ActiveX. There have been several examples posted to the forum that use this to read and write from an Access database. There is also the Database Connectivity Toolkit from NI that uses ODBC/ADO/SQL to talk to any database. For a free utility, check out LabSQL from Jeffrey Travis at http://jeffreytravis.com/lost/download/.