Your database  can be done in Excel, but you will need to get some real good
books on Excel VBA.
And look on Microsoft's web site for some Excel samples.
And I am sure some of the members can direct you to other web sites with
examples, etc.

You may be able to work with Access via VBA - if you can turn on the
references to Access. I don't have a computer where I can check to see which
references do or do not get loaded depending on the applications installed.

To use an access  DB on your PD, you're going to need the underlying "Jet"
engine, even if you don't have the rest of Access installed. You probably
don't have it installed at the moment.

Why not just change your Office 2003 installation to include Access?

Once the Jet engine is installed on your PC, you can access an mdb database
via a connection and SQL from Excel VBA. You can do most things to it
(including creating and deleting tables), but I have this funny feeling that
you can't actually create  an empty mdb database  via SQL. No problem
though - all you need is an existing mdb file to empty and refill.