Set Cell Values From Visual Elements

I'm using excel worksheets to design a form (not a userform) to be used on a touchscreen tablet pc. Often this form will be used to count various objects or observations. For user-friendliness and ease of use, I wanted to provide a 1-click way to enter a text or numeric value into a cell.

There are somewhat standard values that need to get entered (yes/no; yes/no/unsure; 1-5; 1-10; etc.); however there are certain instances where I want to be able to modify the values to be entered. (i.e. 1-10, with ability to apply +10... so they then become 11-20).

There are many questions, and I want to reuse the 'component' and code to be able to assign a value to a cell based on clicking a visual element. The visual element containing the value that was assigned in the cell should also change color to indicate that it is value that has been selected.

For the sake of helping to reduce possible back-and-forth elaboration and eventual proposed solutions in this thread, I'll quickly describe the implementation I tried to adopt, but which has led to issues.

These requirements led me to think that some representation of a button would be necessary; and I tried using grouped textboxes. I got it working well, but then performance crapped out once I started protecting/unprotecting the sheet (as excel doesn't allow reading the value of a grouped textbox, i had to do a build shape-range / ungroup / loop thru shaperange / regroup).

Dave suggested that groups are perhaps not necessary, so I've created this thread. Any/all suggestions welcome. See attached xls file for an example of where I've gotten so far (i.e. this is functionality I want to have, but perhaps a different implementation (non-grouped?) would be possible, which does not suffer from performance issues once incorporating protection/unprotection of a sheet)