Hello,

I'm creating a website for a student organization at my university. Basically, I have an Excel file with a list of contacts that the members of our organization need to be able to search on our website.

The only field that I need our members to be able to search is "contact location." So for example, a member might want to know if our organization has any contacts in Spain, so the member would type "spain" into the "contact location search" field" and would get results.

I really don't known where to turn... I need the easiest thing that would be manageable for a novice. It doesn't need to be an intense search function; just something to make the website functional (so it obviously needs to be uploadable to a server; the server has PHP capability...no idea if that has any relevance). I've been searching around all day and have come across potentials like PHP, SQL, XML, etc. but have no idea which way to turn... I have Office and Adobe Studio programs at my disposal.

Thank you all-powerful and all-knowing web gods! I owe you my deepest gratitude!

Mikey

well good news mikey this is not going to be a hard thing to do. your server is going to need php for sure and mysql would be best to run as the db. if you do not know if your server has mysql all you need to do is open up notepad copy and paste the following code and upload to the server...

PHP Code:

<?php
phpinfo();
?>

look for a topic titled mysql if it exists then you have mysql installed you just need to contact the host and find out what your user and pass is to login to the db after that just post back here and we'll get started..

I agree, PHP and MySQL is the easiest way to do it. If you have both available on your server there is a good tutorial here:
http://www.freewebmasterhelp.com/tutorials/phpmysql

Not as though you need another recommendation of PHP/MySQL, but as the people are saying, it's certainly your best bet.

It will definitely get the job done relatively easily.