I see I wasn't very clear about the point of my rant... I apologize to everyone who has taken the time to thoughtfully offer me solutions of how to get Excel to do this, but I know about that. I should have explained that I know about getting Excel to extend a range when I insert a row using techniques such as having the range include a blank row at the bottom, and I'm not surprised to hear that Excel has a feature like "list builder" bolted on.

When I said, "I'm frustrated every single time I use a spreadsheet", it's not that I can't do whatever it is that I need to get done, I just get annoyed when products are made hard to use when they don't have to be. It's not so much a personal frustration as that I've spent a lot of time at non-profits helping non-computer people use computers, and it's a huge waste of their time and of my time to have to train them how to manipulate the software to get what they want instead of the software just doing it.

C2:C11 was a tremendous advance in 1979 when personal computers had 48K of memory and 40x25 character screens, but goodness gracious, it's thirty years later!

Making something easier to use is a tremendous amount of hard work, but it isn't conceptually all that hard to understand: you look at what people are doing, and you write software to implement that, instead of making them manipulate the software to do the implementation themselves.

I haven't looked at it myself so I don't know if Apple got it right or not, but from Timothee's comment that "Numbers actually manages tables as independent objects of a page", it sounds like they're at least trying.