Database assisted publishing

I trust you will be gentle with a newbie question.  I am a database designer.  A non profit publishes a catalog.  It is a large index of names that are cross referenced to companies.  This is professionally published - and selling it is their primary revenue source.  They currently are in Pagemaker. (don't know what version but will find out)
They find making a change (a person leaves company1 and joins company2) is arduous because each change must be manually changed in several locations through out the publication.  This catalog is cross referenced by name, by company, by county, by industry, etc...so each single change has about 4-5 appearances.  They get a backlog of 30 changes in a month and it is then ~150 different changes.
A database is a fine solution for an easy method to cross reference the data  - let's say Microsoft Access which they have in their Office Suite.  But what I have no experience in - and these folks are not really techies at all - is what Adobe product can import/link to the data (Access can produce an excel or txt file) and result in a professional publication ready result.
I see that Pagemaker is phased out in favor of InDesign.  Have googled around on the topic and FrameMaker has been suggested in one document.
This is a once/year publication.  But changes happen dynamically all year long.  So they would like to make the changes using the database - then at publication time import the data into an Adobe product - hopefully with minimal redesign work - and have something to submit to the printer.
Pragmatic advice is most welcome.  Also - is there a method to get all that data out of Pagemaker in some generic format such as text/excel ?? I am sure they do not want to keystroke it all into a database from scratch.  Gracias in advance.

The Data Merge feature in InDesign would seem to work well for your needs. You can read more about the feature in InDesign Help or you can view these data merge videos.
http://indesignsecrets.com/the-indesigner-episode-43-data-merge.php
http://www.instantindesign.com/index.php?view=386

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