Access is pretty good at importing well-formed csv files that conform to
Windows conventions. I don't know what you mean by "imbedded spaces",
but spaces in the data are not a problem.
You say "generated from another source and provided to me in a csv
format". Is it a csv file produced by a program somewhere, or has it
been converted into csv from something else? Did it originate on a
Windows system or some other (e.g. mainframe, Mac, Linux...)?
Are you importing it via the user interface (File|Get External
Data|Import) or some other way? Does the file have field names in the
first row? Are these legal field names for Access?