I dare say that the problem is less about Excel being dumb than that if you're interested in the underlying logic Excel hides all that from you the minute you c

I dare say that the problem is less about Excel being dumb than that if you're interested in the underlying logic Excel hides all that from you the minute you click off a cell. There's black box programming and then there's just silliness. As for data-entry, ideally, that's not something that humans should be doing for anything but the most trivial concern. If you have huge columns of financial data or test results or what have you, then having someone type it into a computer is silliness of the highest order.