I will try to be brief in my explanation. Pivot table is used for presentation of data in a way you like. In excel you are having rows and columns of data. If you want to have a consolidated form of data, then you could use Pivot Table one of the best tool in excel. The Pivot table creation is made easy by microsoft by a wizard, which will take care of everything. just click ? Help menu and type pivot table and you will now , how to use pivot table wizard. Rows may be made to column and vice versa for easy modification of data, of how you want or your boss want.
I would suggest you one more thing. There are excellent adds in in excel 2007, which are not installed by default. It is analysis tool pak. ok. You are having so much tools, including for Pivot table, and once you installed , you could easily find statistical functions very easily, just providing inputs in required boxes in the tool. For this you have to click the main excel icon at the top most left and choose excel options. In the excel options, in the left pane, choose Adds in. In the emerging box, just in the bottom, in Manage tab, selects excel adds in and click GO. You will find analysis tool pak. You could select the required adds in , and then Click ok. the Adds in wizard will install the requisite adds on in your excel program. Open excel and find Data analysis tab, in the DATA tab, in the top right corner. By just clicking you can do so many statistical functions, that you may know, but in only formulas. For eg, to get all the statistical function like, mean, median and mode, standard deviation , etc, there is one tool, Descriptive statistics and if you click and select the column of input, you get all the details, like standard deviation etc. Like wise, there is Histogram, by which you could easily find the frequency distribution of the total data in one column, by prescribing the frequency distribution of yours like. for example if you are having data , and you want ot find the in between ranges, just choose the maximum for each of the frequency and just select histogram from the Data analysis . You get the chart, by merely clicking a tick on the chart options. Like wise, you could do wonders. Access program is best suited for larger volumes of data and for query inputs. Excel is useful for analysis of about 100000 data ok. You could easily use its wizard to easily debug any error in formula , unlike access, where you have to go to the data to find. Choose your program accordingly