Very nice!

next to figure out if there's a good way to get Perl talking to Access/VBA objects themselves and to return more than a simple scalar.

I've not used Win32::OLE to connect to Access. Actually, I barely use Access as I find it very confusing, so I don't know if it works. But I've had some success using Win32::OLE to connect to Excel and Outlook and return real COM objects.

Cheerio!
Osfameron
http://osfameron.perlmonk.org/chickenman/