Hi Simon,
Ahhhh the good old days of InfoModeler. I remember them well.
I especially liked the consulting assignments that required me to teach ORM/Infomodeler in French!
Anyway, to your questions:
As you have probably discovered, Tutorial 1 shows the steps to generate the DDL.
However, you may have problems with creating an Access DB because the DDL that NORMA generates is "proper SQL" whereas to the best of my knowledge, Access cannot handle some SQL commands. After struggling with Access 2007, I gave up and I now use SQL Server 2008 which works a treat. All you have to do is to paste the NORMA DDL into the "New Query" window in SQL Server Management Studio and bingo - you get a new and well structured DB.
Note that there are still a few problems with the NORAMA DDL that have yet to be fixed.
For example, sometimes it generates two "id" columns in a single table. I just manually edit the DDL before I use it with SQL Server.
Whilst I have never done it myself, I understand that you can use an Access front end with an SQL Server 2008 back end.
However, since you have VS 2010, you might be better off just creating a user interface directly with VS 2010.
The best book I know of that covers how to do this is " Beginning ASP.NET 4: in C# and VB" by Imar Spaanjaars.
Regarding Excel, you might like to know that a large company in the USA recently saved hundreds of thousands of dollars by converting all their Excel spreadsheet applications to new database driven applications. I think they started off with VEA and are now using NORMA.
If you have not already got it, I recommend Terry's 2008 book. "Information Modeling and Relational Databases - Second Edition" (published in 2008).
(We call it the "BBB" (Big Brown Book) - see the sidebar on the home page. This 900+ page book goes into extensive detail about all aspects of ORM.
Hope this helps.
Ken