Note that I said no good way, rather than just no way. Without macros, we get one of either way too many rows, or way to many columns, way too many sheets, or all of the above. Otherwise its too limited to be useful.
Look at how many columns there are now, and that's just deployment, range, engines, fuel, shields, and armor.
Suppose I make a new table for weaponry. You design a weapon there, and in Fleet Comp sheet, we want to reference it. You'd need two columns, one for quantity and one for the reference. Two columns doesn't sound bad, but then, you aren't limited to one weapon, should the sheet? Probably not since that would hobble its usefulness pretty badly, say we make it 5 weapons, its 10 columns now.
Repeat this for every component type, be it racial or otherwise needing at minimum two entries for item and quantity, and more if its sensible to expect multiple types.
I could compress that a bit moving to two rows per hull, so the quantities can exist in the same column, compressing it horizontally by spending vertical space. It will still be extremely wide, there's how many separate components it would make sense to have in one ship together?
I could go vertical, it would not be as tall as it would be wide. It does make it more difficult to keep more than a couple designs on screen at once since the columns become quite wide to fit the widest entry, it just moves the overview problem.
I could take a different approach, and have a mission package sheet, whose whole point is collecting up multiple component names and quantities under a single reference, and then only have to reference a couple mission packages in Fleet Composition, that solves the UI problem....by sweeping it off to another sheet, making a UX problem, scattering stuff all over the place.
Couple that with keeping fleet Composition, but treating it less as a design page and instead as an overview of a new designs page, that keeps the overview functionality, but also expands the number of sheets to manage and switch between.
It'll certainly fit into excel, we have more than enough rows, columns and sheets, but I've yet to work out a sensible way to build it and keep it both functional, manageable, and useful, I've got a couple abortive attempts, they get out of hand pretty quickly.
