I have tried many different things to pull the data from Access and put it into a neat data frame. right now my code looks like this.
from pandas import DataFram
Consider using pandas' direct read_sql method:
import pyodbc
import pandas as pd
...
cnxn = pyodbc.connect('DRIVER={{Microsoft Access Driver (*.mdb, *.accdb)}};DBQ=' + \
'{};Uid={};Pwd={};'.format(db_file, user, password)
query = "SELECT * FROM mytable WHERE INST = '796116'"
dataf = pd.read_sql(query, cnxn)
cnxn.close()