can anyone help me setting up a web page that enables users on an intranet to browse for and then open a excel, access, or word document from the IE, for editing and data entry. I want to be able to activate the application seperatly from internet explorer and then save changes to the file that is located on a server.

Are you sure it is possible?

it's possible to this point....

users on an intranet can browse for and then open a excel, access, or word document from the IE, for editing and data entry.

Activating the application seperately I have never managed to achieve.

You can save the changes locally but then need to manually trigger the upload....

Atleast this is how I have had to do it in the past,.... I might be missing something though so if anyone has any brain waves....