Thanks for taking the time to answer. But my problem as stated in the first line of my question remains: it's a 20+ year-old black-box database app. Your suggestions would be excellent if we had any access to any of the design or the source code it runs, but we don't.
However, I hadn't thought...
I have a horrible task of automating a 20+ year-old "black-box" app that looks like it was written in Access97 and/or VB6, that has an Oracle back-end.
There are over 120 codes to process. You have to enter them one at a time then click a button and it goes away and creates an unnamed "Book1"...