Many thanks for your very detailed reply, that very helpful.

Since I posted, I noticed that Amazon is doing a year's 365 subscription for £54.99, which seems pretty reasonable. I'm just wondering, when the year is up, if I can renew the subscription on a similar Amazon deal, if one exists.

I also read that Microsoft is considering doing away with Access at some point. I don't know if this is true or not. I read that Access is not rated that highly, compared to other databases. At the moment, I've written code to link Excel and Access, so I'm thinking I should start moving to something else, but maybe this is the subject of another thread!