Please show what the salary guide looks like.  I may know where this is leading to.  The answer is (likely) that yes, you can have one table storing all the data, but your table needs to be designed the right way, mostly to conform to normalization.

At the end of the day I will need to produce a scattergram of the 200+ teachers I currently have on this guide as part of negotiating a new Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA).  The records in my database currently lists the Degree, (BA, BA+15, BA+30) and the Step for each employee.   WIth that information I want to be able to reference the salary for that individual based on this layout.

You need a table that looks like this:

Step     Degree    Salary
1         BA          63020
1         BA15       65370
1         BA30       67720
1         MA          70070
1         MA30       72420
1         PhD         75420
2         BA          63520
2         BA15       65870
2         BA30       68220
2         MA          70570
2         MA30       72920
2         PhD         75920
3         BA          64020
3         BA15       66370
3         BA30       68720
3         MA          71070
3         MA30       73420
3         PhD         76420
...
And so on.

This is the one major difference between Excel and Access.  In Excel, you wouldn't even think of storing data like that.  But in Access you sort of have to in order to create a "normalized" table.  

"Normalized" basically means (in simplified terms) each info is stored in one place only.  In my table above, each step-degree combination occurs only once.  There is only one place in the entire table where you find Step 1, Degree BA, for instance.  Thus, the step-degree combination is the "primary key" fields for this table

To look up a salary for Step 20, Degree BA with this table, you only need a simple SQL statement:

     SELECT Salary FROM SalaryGuideT WHERE Step=20 AND Degree="BA"

Got it.   Getting started.