Counting how many times someone took a class (up to 5 different ones); needs to be updated

Hi,
New job = new Excel project, which I don't know very well. (I thought it would be better in Access but they don't want that).
They want an Excel database to keep track of people who take training courses - up to 5 courses total are being tracked for grant purposes - and update this every time a class is run. The info is exported from cvent but the people do not have id numbers or identifiers. They want to count Joe Schmo and which of the 5 classes he took, and also keep track of the municipalities the people come from. The classes are run on multiple dates throughout the year. One person recommended a pivot table to me and one person recommended vlookup. I'm stuck. I just ran out and bought the Walkenbach 2010 Formulas book so I can bring the CDROM to work and hopefully no one will notice.

(This is a temp job. The person who will be updating it after me doesn't know Excel very well either - I thought to make it easier for her I'd like to create a form for data entry - the classes generally only have 20 people in them. If she keeps importing from cvent and cutting and pasting into the spreadsheet how do I keep that from messing something up?)

I hope I am making sense. I changed data in the spreadsheet but you'll get the idea.