I'm helping someone who has a simple simulation model in Excel.  He
wants to expand the model's complexity by adding a lot more data, and I
told him he needed to move to a real database.

He's probably going to keep the basic model calculation in Excel.  
Unfortunately I don't have much database experience so I'm floundering
a bit.  I assume Excel has reasonably transparent links to Access, and
that may be the right way to do it.  Given my choice, though, I'd
rather do it in mySQL.

My question:  what kind of links does Excel have for accessing data in
Access?  Does it have similar links for mySQL?  I've dug around a bit
but all I can find is tools for *converting* Excel <--> mySQL.  I don't
want to convert it, I want to leave the computation in Excel (some
in the spreadsheet, some in VBA) and grab the data out of the database,
in as transparent a method as possible.

Thanks,
Gary