Web Page Development for Office Use

There are a few routes you can take in terms of linking a database to a webpage; however, I think all of them require that you code in some language/script.

Are you familiar with PHP or ASP? Just HTML?
If you tell us your coding experience, it's easier to suggest a solution that would be easiest.

Also, you mentioned "department user." Is this for an Intranet webpage?
If not, you'll want to consider some security issues if the webpage will be on a public server.

This is more of a preference I guess, but I'd recommend using database software that is more web oriented. MySQL is a common engine, and it is free:

http://www.mysql.com/

I would agree with Coonji - we use HTML, PHP and MySQL for all our development and find them very easy to use and robust (and free!!) There are a number of PHP tutorials available; when I started programming in it three years ago I used Webmonkey http://www.webmonkey.com/ and the PHP Manual http://www.php.net/docs.php plus a google search for specific solutions to anything I wanted to do. It just depends on your time availability and level of interest. Good luck.