>I use LibreOffice calc daily as an excel replacement on Linux. I am a Software Developer

The issue is not whether software developers can replace their (barely existent) Excel usage but whether accountants & office workers can.

I have yet to meet a SINGLE accountant aware of openoffice/libreoffice's existence. OO/Libre is deader than dead in the one segment where it matters.

How many people out there have workloads that can't be met by LibreOffice Calc? I would like to meet those people because they must have very interesting jobs and automating their work would have a high monetary impact.

LibreOffice Calc absolutely chugs when it comes to recalculating. Entire sections of the economy run on large, complicated Excel sheets; porting them over would not only be slow, cumbersome, and time-consuming, but would require hardware that does not yet exist to run them on.

THERE IS NO REPLACEMENT FOR EXCEL in the financial sector. Part of the reason why is because Excel has customers -- big, rich, important customers, and lots of them -- and so it is supported and updated as if by an entity that wants to please its customers.

The same could have been said about lotus 123 in the early 90s. Companies got rich getting himem.sys working

It does indeed have a high monetary impact. Just look at Microsoft.

I use PowerPivot and PowerQuery a lot. A job does not have to be particularly interesting for you to derive value from those two, practically any Excel-using job will do. Either of the two is a game-changer by itself.

I think that the bulk of user-facing changes to Excel over the last ten years is in either PowerQuery or PowerPivot. Neither has an adequate alternative in LO, as far as I’m aware.

>How many people out there have workloads that can't be met by LibreOffice Calc?

Irrelevant. We're dealing with industry wide network effects here.

Excel has complete dominance and will keep it unless they release a version where 1+1=3

No. There are no network effects here. Any company in the financial sector would switch to an excel alternative with a tangible edge over Excel in a heartbeat. LO Calc is Excel 2003, but uglier and with more bugs. That is not a viable commercial proposition.

Um, for starters, anyone who needs stable software, professional support, timely software updates, or the ability to run on a mainstream OS.

So basically? Everyone.

LibreOffice has certified consultants you can hire[0] for large deployments, seems to be under pretty active development, and runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux, which together make up the vast majority of OSes used on the desktop. It’s been a while since I’ve used it heavily, but I can’t recall it being particularly unstable.

It doesn’t have professional support for individual users, I’ll grant you that.

[0] https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/professional-support/

I'm in the exact same boat. I know there are differences between excel and calc, but none of them affect my daily usage - which to be fair is about 60-70% using it ass a glorified CSV editor.

I use it regularly just as a GUI for csv/tsv/etc files, because it can nicely deal with that, but I doubt anybody from financial sectors would ever even think about using it. Opportunity costs of not using Excel are just too high.

Same. I find no problem with it at all.