This was also true a decade ago. The fact is OpenOffice and Libreoffice in 2013 still suck compared to Excel. By most standards they even suck compared to Excel 2003. I'm not even sure they are closing the gap at all. And the outlook isn't very good because Google pays top people top dollar and Docs/Sheets/Drive has the exact same problem.
Runs faster on large spreadsheets that do a lot of recalculating, also some functions e.g. pivot tables have become widely used in some business areas.
LibreOffice people are working on speed of execution in Calc
The VB stuff matters of course but as a regular excel user what kills me when I use LibreOffice is:
(1) The responsiveness which I guess is from hardware acceleration. It's like comparing a $60 cheapo tablet and an ipad or Al Bundy's old Dodge to a 2014 Camry.
(2) The need to flout basic Excel conventions as if that's somehow lauditory. LibreOffice has made some strides here (hey you can use commas in formulas again) but it still feels like someone from Samsung should be put in charge of the whole thing.
1) I think the responsiveness of Microsoft Office is largely from using appropriate APIs. LibreOffice is ultimately based on StarOffice, and StarOffice was the worst office program I've ever tried. It dragged its own OS platform on top of whatever OS it was installed on, and it was slow and buggy. LibreOffice is heaps better now, and it's improving fast, but it still suffers from the legacy.
2) I don't see the need to slavishly follow Excel conventions, but I don't know of any evidence that Samsung would be a good lead developer of any software. Be that as it may, Samsung is free as anybody else to contribute to the LibreOffice project.
>2) I don't see the need to slavishly follow Excel conventions, but I don't know of any evidence that Samsung would be a good lead developer of any software. Be that as it may, Samsung is free as anybody else to contribute to the LibreOffice project.
I think 2) was a joke about Samsung copying Apple.
Someone with the goal "make Calc a better Excel than Excel" needs to take a serious interest involving lots of developers.
Basically, LO needs to be able to import the sort of monster power user spreadsheet that takes 16 hours to run in Excel, and run it fidelitously in 12. These guys sign the cheques.
What would that take?
1. Get a pile of example spreadsheets. (Code to real-world examples, like Wine does, rather than abstract specs that are often inaccurate.) This will be the hard part.
2. Every OOXML tag in the documents needs to be correctly imported and understood.
3. The VBA in the documents needs to run perfectly.
4. Optimise the hell out of it.
That gets LO good enough to seriously compete. Then you make the IDE as good for those users as Excel's is.
LibreOffice is much better than OpenOffice, but both still pale in comparison to Excel on Windows. However, Microsoft Excel for Mac sucks, and that hasn't slowed Mac adoption. It's now relatively standard practice for anyone doing serious Excel work on a Mac to install a Windows VM and a Windows copy of Excel.
It really does suck on Mac, as does Word. I'm guessing this is just Microsoft sticking it to Apple, but it's disappointing for their users who work on multiple platforms. Just make it the same everywhere MS!
