You put my mind at ease with the statement that if I need to move up
in the future my excel  stuff is largely transferrable to Access.

I'm not really sure what you mean by "planning for the column
expansions in the VBA code". David Smart has suggested named ranges,
column headings, and lookups--all of which I am investigating. Do you
have anything else in mind, or should those 3 do the trick?

I enter all of my data  into the database  by copy/paste off web sites.
When you say that I "can use the form feature in Excel to be able to
enter data into the database" I'm not sure what you mean. Are you
referring to manual data entry? Please elaborate briefly.