I have searched for a way of connecting to a MSAccess database from *nix and have never found any way other than ODBC.

The problem I think is in the dlls that are required for queries to the database. In terms of writing data to MSExcel files typically people use the Win32::OLE, a host of Spreadsheet modules or the DBD-Excel method.. but I haven't tried this on anything that is not a MS platform though.

Can you not dunp the data to a MySQL db and just create a web front end for you boss to use..? although you did mention not really wanting to have to write another admin script.

Update: Have you thought about dumping the data to XML at all..?