Moreover, if you’re a sysadmin who receives “report requests” as .accdb files from finance, the ACE engine + PowerShell is the fastest way to automate extraction without clicking through Access.

Your ETL server shouldn’t have Excel installed. But with the ACE engine, a simple SELECT * INTO SQLServerTable FROM OPENROWSET('Microsoft.ACE.OLEDB.12.0','Excel 12.0;HDR=YES;DATABASE=C:\data.xlsx','SELECT * FROM [Sheet1$]') works beautifully.