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If you want to push around some text, do mathematical calculations, create spreadsheets on the fly from raw data, populate database (ie, access) fields, you can't go wrong with Perl. It's really easy to learn, and will help you understand programming logic. Also, it's free to download (as long as you don't make profits from your work, then there's a fee to use Perl.) And there's a TON of good tutorials and help files on the net, as well as thousands of usenet topics about specific problems you may encounter and how to solve them.
Really, any simple language is a good place to start. I cut my teeth on Atari BASIC, then picked up some Pascal, went on to QBASIC, and lastly I've been using Perl for the last few years. It's good enough for the things I need, although you'll never write a hit game with it.
The key thing is to grasp the concepts, the logic you need to talk to the computer. After you have that, any language is pretty much a matter of syntax.
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