Microsoft's major source of revenue from Excel comes from corporate licensing. To make the scripting language compatible you have to copy the internals of the other programme as well.

To open ordinary spreadsheet files you only have to copy the 'surface' of the other spreadsheet. The team at Microsoft were determined not to let anyone steal the crown from them – and Visual Basic was the mechanism they settled on. Microsoft won the spreadsheet market from Lotus-1-2-3 by ensuring the Excel could open 1-2-3 files and do everything 1-2-3 could do. The big compatibility challenge to LibreOffice is macros and Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) – which is hardly surprising if you know the history of Excel. data tools like filter, sort and subtotal.Here is a short list of things you will also recognise: It is not surprising that LibreOffice is so familiar – the intention of the project is to allow people to move away from Microsoft Office and so naturally LibreOffice tracks features in Microsoft Office 2003 and copies them. Libre Office Calc - Charting options in Excel compared Other familiar features

Libreoffice calc