[sireat]

LibreOffice should shine in customizability but it is not the case for intermediate users.

Anecdotally I was trying to set up a simple keyboard shortcut to change color of a row of the selected cell in a spreadsheet.

Neither Excel nor Calc offer this functionality out-of-box except for user defined macros.

On LibreCalc 5.3 custom keyboard shortcuts are awkwardly defined but once I figured shortcuts out I got stuck on recording a macro. There was a choice of Python,Java and I think VBA lookalike. Very nice, except it was not immediately obvious on how to proceed. I'd love to use Python to script Calc but I did not have time to hunt for the API.

On Excel 2013, within 5 minutes I was able to record a macro then edit the VBA not having used VBA in 5 years. Plus I was able to add a few extra bonus macro commands within 15minutes.

I am sure you can do really nifty stuff when you become a power user in LibreOffice. The problem is that a large proportion of users are casual users like me.

By comparison, I can create and edit nice macros in Photoshop/Illustrator only being a very casual user(maybe once every few months).