Prevent products from appearing in latest products

You can use the "display the results" action of a mass action (menu System>Mass actions) in order to display the products in a table with the columns you want (and mainly the product_name and product_created columns) and then, when you double click on a cell of the table you can directly edit it and modify it. That way, you can change the date so that they aren't the latest products created and so they won't display in your latest products module anymore.
In the end, it's like doing it in PHPMyAdmin so I wouldn't say it's easier.