I'm no expert in this world so I can only imagine the ignorance in this question.
I'm looking to build a very simple form tool for a work project. That said, all content needs to remain locally on a mapped share drive. Rather than connecting a mysql database to my form, would I be able to get away with just reading and editting a local .txt file using PHP's fwrite & fread functions?
Why not try SQLite: you'll have the advantage of a text file (single file) but with the power of a real database.