I'm trying to create a French 101 vocabulary-list generator, for my
college course, but can't figure out how to input the "special
characters". For the letter E, for instance, I need to apply at least
4 different accent marks to the vowel. I can do this easily enough in
Word 2000, but with Excel 2000, have searched to no avail!

I don’t know a built-in way as easy as Word's.

Since you type French a lot, you might consider setting up an auto-correct
item for each special character.

For example, I just tried
Tools AutoCorrect Options
and added
Replace ,e,
With <Alt0233
using the numeric keypad for the four digits

Now, when I type
,e,
even in the middle of a word I get an accented "e".

(I have Excel 2003.)