Well, one idea is to enter the stuff directly into an Access Form
instead of via Excel.

From what you say, I infer that you don't have that option, and that
someone else maintains the Excel data.  If so, and if all you want to do
is to create shipping manifests, why not just stay in Excel?  You can
sort the data there, copy them to a Worksheet that will serve as the
shipping manifest, or import them (via Mail Merge) into a Word document
that will serve as the shipping manifest.

Where Access would really shine, I expect, is if you want to organize
your data to do some analysis of shipping patterns or something of that
nature.  (And Excel can also do a pretty good job of some kinds of
analysis, for example via Pivot Tables and Solver.)  So I guess I'd be
interested in knowing why you want to use Access.  Perhaps some sample
data and a detailed description of the kind of report (for example, a
shipping manifest) you'd want to see would be helpful here.

  -- Vincent Johns <vjohns@alumni.caltech.edu>
  Please feel free to quote anything I say here.