Working db offline

I'm probably making life difficult for myself here, but then really the remote database is only of use for the one table that will be collecting the form results as everything else I do on the local db will never get published then? I was told I had to 'drag it offline' then do the mail merge then drag back online (which I would have thought would overwrite the new form results).
The whole problem is that this is coursework and the specification says the web site has to be linked to a relational database. Well mine is, but teacher is insisting on this dragging offline (to desktop and opening with Access I think)  business. Can't ask her to explain as school now closed for two weeks and I have only just realised all the problems this might entail. My idea was to export the table from the database on the remote site to a table in my local db (say table A) and copy the contents into another table (table B) where I could do queries etc, then each time I exported the data again, it wouldn't matter that it was overwriting table A as the data would then be stored in table B. This would mean that only the db on the local site would be up to date but I can't see any other way round it.
Sorry for rabbiting on but you are the first person who has grasped my problem and knows what you are talking about. Thanks!!

Why are you using Access and Frontpage anyway? Is your teacher still stuck in the 1990's? Seems like a bit of a waste of time learning things which are out of date or in the case of Frontpage have been issued with an End Of Life with FP Extensions no longer working at all in Windows 2008 R2.