Excel question

My father has some checklists that he tracks in Excel. Parts, but not all, of the different lists overlap. He wants to be able to set up the lists so that if he deletes an item from a specific section of one list, it'll delete the item from all lists. Conversely, if he adds an item to a list, he wants it to be added automatically to all lists. Obviously, he can set up big sections of each sub-list to point to a big section of the main list, and just have a lot of blank lines on each list. But a more elegant solution would be nice, because the lists area already very long and he'd rather keep it tidy.

Anybody know of a way to do this? I know that if I have charts that read data from cells A1-C4, and I add a row between lines 2 and 3, or delete line 3, Excel will automatically update my chart, correctly incorporating or removing the date. So it's not a wholly alien concept to Excel. But I don't know if there's a way to adapt this to make an attractive checklist.

Edit: My father worked for 25 years as a programmer at IBM, and is much more technically savvy than I am, as a general rule. So there's no need to be concerned that any existing solution would be too complicated for him to implement. :D