Why are you using Access? It’s a pain in the butt and I don’t like it. Transfer your database to MySQL for easier compatibility with… everything.

I had to make this transition a few weeks ago, and here’s what I did. Remember that I am not a database expert, but this worked for me.
1. Download MySQL on your computer. Click on the Enterprise Edition link here. Oracle apparently controls MySQL nowadays, so sign in or register with them to get to the download. You can insert fake data in every data field for the registration except the email address. Use a real email address so you can confirm your registration. Once you get to the download page in Oracle, select MySQL and your computer type (i.e. Windows 64 bit). Input that query, then download the “MySQL Installer 5.6.20.0 Package” (or whatever version they’re currently on).
2. Run the installer .msi. Install the “Developer Default” setting unless you know any better. When you start installing, MySQL will probably tell you that you’re missing some pre-requisite programs. Just install them through MySQL like it wants you to. Install the program. After the install, there will be some configuration. On the “MySQL Server Configuration” page, I’d leave the defaults (Port=3306). On the next page, you’ll have to specify a password. Remember that password for future use. I’d leave the defaults on the other pages as well, unless you want to uncheck the box for starting MySQL Server at computer startup.
3. Download the “Access to MySQL” tool from here. The download link is at the top of the page.
4. Install the Access to MySQL program.
5. If your computer is like mine, when you try to run the Access to MySQL program, a box will pop up and complain about drivers. It will say you can only create dump files instead of doing the transition in one step. Whatever, just continue.
6. Click “Next” on the first page. In the Filename field of the second page, input the path to the .mdb file of your Access database. If you have security settings (username/password), enter those. On the third page, create a dump file (probably your only option). Type the name that you want the MySQL database to have and the path that you want the dump file saved at. Click “Next” or “Run” on any remaining pages. This will create a dump file of all of your tables in the Access database that you specified. Now we’ll import that dump file into MySQL.
7. Open MySQL Workbench. Double click on your “Local instance MySQL56” box on the front page. Enter your password that you just specified during installation.
8. Goto Server->Data Import. Select the bubble for “Import from Self-Contained File” and enter the path to your dump file. Click Start Import at the bottom.
9. If all went well, your Access database will now be available in MySQL under the database name that you specified in step 6.

You can now query your database from Python using my instructions from last week.

1. Set up a MySQL Database on your computer.
2. Install the Python library MySQL-python from http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/
3. In your code, add the import statement “import MySQLdb” at the top.
4. Find the database host, username, password, and database of interest.
5. Set up a database connection in Python with a line similar to
“db_connection = MySQLdb.connect(host=’localhost’, user=’root’, passwd=’FluffyBunnies1234′, db=’MyAwesomeDatabase’)”
Here, my host is “localhost” because the database is stored locally on my desktop at work. I access the database from the “root” user account. You can also connect to external databases as long as you frame the connection string properly.
6. Set up a database cursor that you will use to execute queries. “cursor = db_connection.cursor()”
7. Structure up your SQL query. The query should be a string. All white space is treated equivalently, so you can have a space or a newline between parts of the SQL. Example “SQL = SELECT alpha, beta FROM parameter_table WHERE alpha>.5 ORDER BY beta ASC”.
8. Execute the query with the cursor. “cursor.execute(SQL)”
9. Fetch the output. “output = cursor.fetchall()”. If your query will return too many results to grab all at once, you can instead use the function fetchone() instead.
10. Your “output” variable will be a list of lists, where each inner list represents one line returned by query and each element of the inner list represents a column referenced in the SELECT statement. If my query above returned 500 parameter combinations, then I would have a list of 500 lists, where each of the 500 inner lists has two elements: alpha and beta.

Hope this gets you started. For a full documentation of the MySQLdb class, you could start here. Pay attention to make sure you’re reading the parts about the MySQLdb wrapper.