Need to control Internet Explorer/Firefox

I have been trying for 2 months to work out how to control a web browser with alomst no success. Right now I am relying on a carefully placed cursor, sendkeys, and copy-paste.

I pull information from our parent franchise's website for over a thousand inventory items daily. First I download the invoices for the new items, then I do a query on the existing items to check for updates. All of this is done one-at-a-time.

What I think I need is to learn how to identify input boxes, buttons, and fields in the browser so I can interact with them directly. I have tried several sample subs and read lots of post, but nothing has worked. Things like <getelementbyid>, etc, have all resulted in errors. I have also installed Selenium IDE and tried using Firefox instead of IE. No luck

Here's what I am doing now for the updates:

Manually open the website and log in.
Pull up the first item to get my cursor in the right spot.
Run UpdatSpecs2 to set things up
It calls UpdateSpecs3, which cycles through each item, using sendkeys to pull it up on the website, pasting the entire page into a blank worksheet, then parsing out the data and updating with any changes.

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Any help you can give me would be most appreciated. I am absolutely new to any kind of coding, and I love VBA but I'm overwhelmed. Thank so much.

Have you learnt HTML? You're not going to get anywhere without understanding how web pages are structured, the methods of selecting nodes in IE are just the same as selecting in JavaScript, so when you're reading up, don't limit your reading to just VBA.

A thorough understanding of HTML and a rudimentary grasp of JavaScript will do you wonders

That's what I was afraid of. Thanks