Ah, no. Heiroglyphics is just somewhere between an alphabet and syllabary - there are 60 odd symbols and they match to sounds like 'a', 'ts', 'gh'.
The stuff you see in museums is the 'posh' stuff for best, there is a quick writing version of it (also known as heiratic) where the full pictures were made more abstract.
> Could Shakespeare have written what he did in hieroglyphics?
For 3,000 years everybody did. Oh, and don't forget little things like inventing hydrolic engineering in hieroglyphics.
Hieroglyphics is as good a writing system as this text I am typing.
> You could argue that Excel is a programming environment.
Actually Excel/spreadsheets are THE programming environment - used by millions of people every day to perform their daily work - loads more than use obscure programming specialist dialects/paradigms like Ruby, or Java or whatever.