[AccessD] Access "Bloat" - Basic Questions

My background is in the mainframe world where we never had to be
concerned about bloat.

Now I work in the Microsoft Access world and it appears that I have had
my first encounter with significant bloating.

We have an Access 2007 application that obtains data from several
SQL-Server tables (via ODBC) and from two Excel files.

This application creates a number of reports.  One of the reports needs
data from 2 SQL-Server tables and 2 Excel files.  Because of the
complexity of the data, we cannot simply use queries to create the
report, but we have had to resort to an intermediate Access table that
is updated with VBA code via Record-Set processing.  Once the data is
processed and stored in this intermediate table, a query is used to pull
this data from the table for use by the report. 

The report in question can be run for any desired date range.  If the
date range is small, we see little increase in the size of the accdb
file.  However, if the date range selected is large (like a full year's
worth of data), the accdb file grows from 15 MB to 85MB.  I believe that
this large increase in size is primarily caused by the Access table that
is used for the intermediate processing of the data.

In the mainframe world, we used "temporary work files" for such
intermediate processing.  Is there something similar available in Access
2007?

One idea that I have considered is to use a delete query to clear out
all of the records in the intermediate table after the report is
generated and then add a "Compact on close" option to the application.

Again, I am new to the world of Access bloat and would like to better
understand how others handle this issue.

Thanks,
Brad