Purchase and learn SwissSys?
I kid. But SwissSys is way the heck more intuitive to learn and use than WinTD, and it’s about the same price, depending on where you buy it from.
Answering the last query first, our experience as a club has been that Mike Nolan is very helpful in both pointing out existing resources and answering queries that aren’t covered in existing resources, for serious questions and development issues. But the people asking the questions also have a fair degree of experience (i.e. we think we know what questions to ask and have the ability to understand and use the answers…)
I have found entering tournaments manually through TD/A to be a very easy process for small events. (And I’ve done it before just for the experience of having done it - normally I use WinTD.)
I would think creating a “standard spreadsheet,” especially one that has some cells locked and some not, to be a not-so-easy process. Further, if one wanted to make ratings queries, etc., I’d imagine one would get into macros to pull it off. Using Excel and running unsigned macros are an interesting process - by default it won’t let you do it due to the security risks involved. Not that it would be impossible, just I suspect more cumbersome than a manual lookup for ten or so players. Maybe I’ll give a go, though, just to try it.