@chmwman
Keep in mind that Excel and Access serve different purposes and, therefore, include a large number of different features. Some things are, of course, "similar", but it's not a good idea to count on that.
Here, for example, it sounds like you are working with what is often referred to as "a domain" of values. Common examples might include days of the week. There are 7 of them; they are universally understood and agreed upon; there will never be more than or less than 7. It's a "domain" of values and it's closed, so this kind is called "A Closed Domain". Similar examples are months of the year and, depending on where you live, the states or provinces in your country.
A second kind of domain is often encountered in Access relational database applications. These are well known, more or less stable, collections of values important to your organization. Vendors, for example, or Shippers, or Products. Each of these is a domain because it consists of the values relevant to your organization's activities. Departments might be important to a corporation, for example. These are "Open Domains" which consist of stable, but not totally rigid, groups of values.
In both cases, though, you will have a table for each such set of Domain values. A Product table for a manufacturer, for example, or a Client table for a services provider. These tables are sometimes referred to as Lookup tables, particularly those that hold values for a Closed Domain.
Instead of tasking your interface with the job of "remembering" them as you do with the not-terribly-reliable Excel feature, you use combo or list boxes on your forms which are bound to those Lookup tables to supply the appropriate values from which users select.
This is what Daniel was referring to.
In a relational database application, there are multiple benefits to using combo and list boxes for such tasks beyond the simple fact that you don't burden users with having to remember which ones are valid for YOUR organization and which ones are not.
