Hi Naval Design, Thank you for taking the time to read my post,...we're almost there with what you wrote, but it's a bit more complicated, and I'm sure it shouldn't be.
The database is on our intranet, but due to restrictions placed on us by the manufacturer, we can't access that data except through a terminal window or a new application that will cost us a ton of money to get. I originally researched it, but it's overkill for what we actually need it to do.

You see, each day, a lady in our office access a secure website, and pulls our invoices through the built in WORD viewer on the site. She then prints them off and has another office worker manually enter in the invoice data into our Dealer management system (Database). Once it's entered in there, we really can't pull data from it, because it's locked down. The company that we use to manage that information won't let us pull from it for outside applications.

I originally set up a DMS system to manage the WORD documents we were downloading, but the management didn't like typing in search criteria. They preferred some sort of drop down menus that were already pre-populated with the inventory data, i.e. Year, Make, Model, Color, etc. that they could select from. I knew that we could develop a PHP page that could populate with that data, but had to figure out how we could get that data extracted from the WORD documents.

I searched on the internet for some way to extract the specified fields from the MS WORD Documents, but ended up in a sea of data mining applications that didn't do what I was hoping for. It would be great it GM could just send the invoices over to us in Excel format, but that's the act of congress thing I was speaking of. They'll only allow us to view this data in MS word format, or through their secure website with a less than user friendly interface. Most of the people that I work with that need access to these invoices are sales people, and they're pretty much the On / OFF, click here bunch. Once you get past that, they're lost. They know how to sell cars really well, but once you get them past the 3rd step, of anything technical, they glaze over, and It's useless. That's why I'm trying to make the end user interface as simple as possible.

I've listed below what ideally we'd like to see happen.

1.) Download the word documents from the secure server, and pop them into a shared intranet directory.
2.) Run a script, program, or procedure that somehow will pull specific data from the Word documents, and populate into a MySql database.
3.) Web based viewer for our intranet that has drop down menus for us to chose from, i.e. Year, Make, Model,, etc.

• Once all the critera is selected from the drop down menus, that will narrow the field of available invoices. (shown below the drop down menus in a small viewer window that dynamically updates and lists the invoices as items are selected.) For example, it I started with all the 2008 Malibus, it would list all of them in the window until I selected the Red color drop down, then all that would be listed there would be all the red 2008 Malibu vehicles.
• Then the end user could click the specific invoice to view the original word document that the data was pulled from. They could then either print it, put it into a pending state, or drop it into a sold folder. ( I was thinking like a tag or something on the file, but I'm quickly finding out that my programming skills are sorely lacking).

I've got what I want to do in my head, but It's kind of like saying I want to build the worlds first flying car with nothing more than a hair dryer, and a lawnchair. It seems almost impossible to do what I'm hoping for, and I'm not quite sure that It can even be done. The tools, and knowledge I have are limited, and I've been trying to come up with a simple solution, but I don't think it exists.

If this can be accomplished, or invented, I'm sure there might ba a patent in it somewhere. Thank you again for your reply. I hope the above information helps.