What you see in the exe is the code for the loader and the binary executable instructions for the CPU.
That is "impossible" for humans to read.
The closest way "humanly" to edit an exe file is to disassemble it into an Assembly format, and that's the lowest level that is "humanly readable".
If you just want to replace strings in an EXE, that is possible with Notepad, but understanding what the code does is not really.
Learn Assembly if you want to understand the EXE.
If the program is written in C#, you can decompile the binary code back to source.
What are you looking for?