I run the Black Sabbath site here: http://www.black-sabbath.com. In it, I have a pretty extensive list of old tour dates by the band going back to their earliest days in the late 60's. Research on this is an ongoing project, and as such, the dates need to be refreshed. The fellow that coordinates most of that work keeps the dates in an Access 2000 MDB format database. In the past when I would get a refresh of the dates from him, he'd export it in a format that I would then (mostly manually) stick in an HTML page. This gets tedious, and we'd like to streamline.

Since I use Movable Type for the news area of this site, I was thinking of expanding it into doing the tourdate archives. The problem is how to get his data into Movable Type. I asked him, and he cannot directly export from his database to the import file format that Movable Type uses.

The question becomes how do I get the data from his export into an import.txt format usable by Movable Type? It would seemingly require an external program that can massage the data into a format that MT can deal with.

What I'm looking for is to see if such a beast has already been created. There's no point in re-inventing the wheel here if we don't have to.

Anyone know anything about this scenario? Thanks.

Added note: He told me that he can export in these formats:

dBase 3 through 5
Microsoft Access
Microsoft Excel
Lotus 1-2-3
Paradox 3 through 8
Basic text formats (comma delimited, etc.)
Rich Text
XML
ODBC