In any case, Access is not much more than a fancy, tweaked version of Excel. What, pray tell, is the underlying difference between a RDB program setup, with multiple defacto spreadsheets for it to drive .. and a spreadsheet or spreadsheet workbook ?
Excel is flat file, has a record limit, is unable to create data relationships, has no referential integrity, is single user is has a completely different memory management mechanism when dealing with multi workbook projects.
Apart from that, yer, totally the same.
On topic, having a new worksheet aka "tab" for every page in your logbook is not the way to go. The issues I can see are;
1. Its going to be difficult to navigate once you get enough pages. Youre only able to click forwards or backwards either 1 sheet at a time, or to the start/finish of your sheets. Hence, if you have 3 logbooks and 300 odd worksheets, its going to take you 'a while' to get to sheet X without VBA knowledge. Excel is not designed for this.
2. Memory, unless you're using a 64 bit version (with the memory to match), excel only allocates a certain amount of memory depending on version. Exceed that and you're in trouble, which is not actually impossible to do once you have a few logbooks. An excel sheet only 4 mb in size can actually occupy 40 meg of memory allocation when trying to save. In addition to the memory leaks and other memory limits like heap space you're also going to run into track cell memory problems with the unused cells.
eg, if you have 300 workbooks (only 3 logbooks, maybe even less, how many pages in a normal logbook anyway?), at 17,179,869,184 cells per workbook, well.... It'll work for a while.
Its why I have used a single workbook for the logbook section of my little sheet. If you needed a page per page listing of your totals for some reason, then create a function that lists the totals every X lines of the main worksheet and displays them in a seperate table or workbook. Same advantages of having 3,653,523,652 worksheets, no disadvantage of having a memory hungry, impossible to navigate excel sheet.
Or you could just use mine, either way.
The pivot table is going to be difficult to implement on possibly hundreds of seperate worksheets, and will be very labor intensive. I don't recommend it without VBA knowledge.