Forum Discussion
Stop First Row Being Numbered in Excel
Based on my experience and everything I've ever read, there is no way to change excel's row/column labels via excel's menu or vba, which is what it appears you are asking.
You can hide or unhide the row/column labels, and while you might be able to use a formula to visually replicate row/column label(s), either the custom row or column label won't agree to the actual cell references in your existing formulas, which comes back to Peter's comment regarding it would work better in a structured named environment.
You could do this (replicating excel's column letters), for example, but your data table row 1 will actually be Excel's row 3 (still mismatched, but it wouldn't be as obvious).
Seriously, I don't see any available options that I think you will like based on what you've said thus far.
I have tripped into this one more time and found that after years have passed, Microsoft is still intractable. Since the numbers are visible, it is ridiculous not to be able to control where they begin. A header row function would be "outside the spreadsheet matrix" and be easily seen as such by anyone who can see where one is on the, again: VISIBLE DEFAULT NUMBERING. Another solution would be to begin columns with zero instead of 1. This makes the most sense to me, but either of these solutions require Microsoft to finally give up on not addressing this. The only solution available to the users I see is to use the page header function and put your column heads there, then use the layout that makes it visible. This forces you to waste time configuring the header, that could have easily been a checkbox. We are doomed to have the left side of the interface disagrees with our numbering if we simply put headers on row one, it is the curse of Excel.