John Lutes wrote:
We recently sent pivot tables to our reps with three year history of several
hundred products (SKU's) and several hundred customers.

We asked that they insert a forecast in the Pivot table source data
worksheet so we could then rebuild the table to display the history and the
forecast.

The request confused most of our sales reps who are admittedly not
particularly EXCEL SAVVY. They insisted on putting there input in the
available cell NEXT to the pivot table data making capturing their forecast
data back to the source data labor intensive.

Is there a solution to this problem? Is there an MS office product more
suited for this task? What is the true meaning of life?

Well the first lesson, I should think, is, "sales reps are not usually
good data heads." Knowing this group is not particularly acute in that
regard, I suggest you spell out your expectations.

You might do well to give them a template sheet on which to enter their
data, so their numbers are not intermingled with yours. True, this will
separate their data from the PT source as well, but it gives some
control over what gets entered and where. If you structure the data
entry sheet in such a way that it can easily be copy/pasted into the PT
source you can minimize the headache.