As unglamorous as it is, Excel is great, and you can also create some _very_ powerful software rather easily with VBA.
I hate the lack of smooth scrolling, especially when you have differing cell heights. I hate the lack of cell padding, leading to manually sizing every row.
Most of all, I hate the total lack of focus. What sort of document is it aimed at creating, these days? The answer is certainly not what is was 10–15 years ago, but the basic interface hasn't changed much (ribbon aside).
Often equations are needed, along with graphing. It's very expandable and customisable by a non-programmer with VBA.
I'm not saying it's the best, but it's pretty good at what it does, and there's not a better spreadsheet application that I've found.
As an aside, I've seen it be used for managing portfolios worth millions. Then you get a clever IT dept say 'oh no, you shouldnt be doing that on a spreadsheet' and so a new IT project is created to retire the spreadsheet and copy the functionality. Predictably, the project is late, over-budget and under-delivers, so the spreadsheet lives on. Tragic tale of far too many IT projects.
http://download.zotero.org/integration/Zotero-LibreOffice-Pl...
I've written grant proposals and papers published in peer reviewed journals with LibreOffice and that plugin.
1) smart art in PowerPoint
2) most of the data analysis and pivot table tools in Excel
3) powerful and mature, albeit cumbersome scripting support (VBA)
These features are important for a multitude of reasons, but for those who only need a good word editor, MS Office is certainly not a necessity anymore.
I can tell you that this is definitely not the case. I've used Word a lot in (non-software) engineering setting, and there are a large number of features used on a regular basis that simply are not available in LibreOffice or Google Docs. Things like citation support, text wrapping for images, and a good equation editor.