Thank you both for your advice. I shall look into the modules you have suggested. Allow me to explain my idea for this app.

I am an instructor for certification school. We have all our data tied up in Access databases. All our billing documents in VB enhanced Excel pages. And a whole lot evaluations form tied up in mail-merged and locked Word documents.

Instead of redoing everything (meaning shifting to a system based on a true RDMS, web scriting, and browser) I'd rather use all the MS office based forms within a web-app for our intranet. This way I can improve (make completing our daily tasks faster and easier) our current system while creating a more robust future system that will eventually replace the current system.

I have recently found that PHP can do this with it's poorly documented COM support. I was hoping that Perl had a better documented method.