[davidgerard]

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.