Data input from comm port

There have been a lot of lay-offs where I work & I have a project I want to do so I don't get layed off when its my turn.
We have a fixture that is manually cycled to perform an operation then send the results to a comm port. I've been able to acquire a PC and connected it to the comm port. I've cycled the fixture & captured data on the PC with HyperTerminal. With this data I've setup a table in Access & Imported the data file into the table ok, so I've got the basic setup working.
What I really need is to get the 60 byte data string from each cycle of the fixture to automatically be input into the fields of the table & a label generated on a local printer.
I've heard about several ways to get the data into the Access table from importing to writing a VB program. As I'm just now learning VB I haven't learned how to do this with mods like MSCommControl yet & I think it may be accomplished with a more direct method since the data string is only 60 bytes.
Could anyone help me learn how to do this & save my job?