Success! Despite possibly being frowned upon as bad practice, I managed to achieve the desired result by trying it with multiple documents and IDs. If anyone has a better suggestion, I'm open to hearing it!
While my implementation may be simple, here is the code in case others are interested in doing something similar:
I reintroduced $<'div id= metrics'/> to create a new div tag appended to #main.
<script src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.11.0.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
$(function () {
$('a').click(function() {
var pD = $('#period').val();
var wD = $('#week').val();
var dD = $('#day').val();
var eD = $('#empId').val();
$('<div id"metrics" />').load(
pD
+ wD
+ dD
+ eD, function(){
$(this).hide()
.appendTo('#main')
.slideDown(1000);
});
});
});
</script>
I then removed the .html # from the function and simply added it as a value to the #empId options.
<form>
<select class="dates" id="period">
<option value="p00"class="emp">Period</option>
<option value="p01">1</option>
<option value="p02">2</option>
<option value="p03">3</option>
<option value="p04">4</option>
<option value="p05">5</option>
<option value="p06">6</option>
<option value="p07">7</option>
<option value="p08">8</option>
<option value="p09">9</option>
<option value="p10">10</option>
<option value="p11">11</option>
<option value="p12">12</option>
<option value="p13">13</option>
<option value="p14">14</option>
</select>
<select class="dates" id="week">
<option Value="w00"class="emp">Week</option>
<option value="w01">1</option>
<option value="w02">2</option>
<option value="w03">3</option>
<option value="w04">4</option>
<option value="w05">5</option>
<option value="w06">6</option>
</select>
<select class="dates" id="day">
<option value="d00"class="emp">Select Day or Leave Blank for Week</option>
<option value="d01">1</option>
<option value="d02">2</option>
<option value="d03">3</option>
<option value="d04">4</option>
<option value="d05">5</option>
<option value="d06">6</option>
<option value="d07">7</option>
</select>
<select id="empId">
<option class="emp">Employee ID</option>
<option value=".html #JXS0001">John Smith</option>
</select>
<a href="#">Load Metrics</a>
</form>
</div>
<div id="main">
<h1>Metrics</h1>
</div>
There's still work to be done (such as making the employee ID dynamic and editable from a separate HTML file), but that's the exciting part (and I know how to do it now!). Many thanks to @bloodyKnuckles for assisting this newbie.