"Dramatically expand their skills" and "easier to understand" are opposite directions; ease of use means getting some results with as little skill expanding as absolutely possible.
For immediate results and learning, your proposal spreadsheets would be harder to understand - if your data fits on a single screen (not ...F405), then you can just point your finger at it and say "Here! here are the widget prices!", but any structured model would (a) require thinking about what a right structure would be for the situation (that's the hard to use part, takes effort), (b) require understanding about what makes a proper data model (that's the hard to learn part, many people won't know how) and (c) makes it nontrivial to update that model (that's the hard to maintain part - less chance to break stuff, but more effort to do it properly).
For reusable datasheets and estabilished processes it's an entirely different situation, and for that there are not-Excel apps or named ranges within excel; but creating an usable dataflow and a reasonable structure is a much, much more difficult skill than using excel currently. It may be easy for you, but not for the general population; heck, I see heaps of second year CS students that have no clue about how to structure their data, so requiring that can't make spreadsheets easier to understand.
