I´ve recently poked about a bit with SharePoint 2007. Trying to avoid using the somewhat costly web services (which is also hard to debug and has kinda crappy interfaces) I´ve been using the possibility to link SharePoint lists to Access databases.
However, I found it quite un-intuitive to select what columns to select into the database. I tried almost every button before finding this neat thing:
Just right-click the column headers and choose “Unhide Columns” and you´ll get a list of all the available columns for selection. Then just use OleDb or any other connnector in your code to access the data.