Okay, thanks in advance for your help w/ this:

We have been given a copy of an access db for use at our place of business.  
A similar but non-competing company gave us the db, which they either
developed themselves or had someone write for them.  We are not able to open
the typical Access menus in order to modify the db in any way, so we've had
to experiment w/ opening records in Excel to even see how it is laid out
behind the scenes.

It has been a few years since I've worked w/ Access, and setting it up
doesn't appear to have become any simpler in that time.  What is our best
course of action if we know we'd like to utilize a similar databse to the one
we were given?  Since it's not as simple as importing our tables into their
db, what do we do?

Do we need to hire a developer to create this Access db for us?  Or is there
some other way of going about "opening" the "set-up" modules of this existing
db that I just haven't figured out?