[cowsaysoink]

You'd be surprised at how many engineering companies (research and otherwise) use Excel. I'd argue that it is used more than Matlab or any other programming language/environment in some fields (like Mech Eng).

Now that is just a small subset of all the little corporations that use it for bookkeeping and what else (those could probably get by with libreoffice) and every other major company in the world.

Microsoft was also smart in moving to docx and xlsx because libreoffice doesn't support that very well and now has an even better reason for people to avoid switching, I'd like to assume they don't support the open formats for this same reason.

[damian2000]

Seconded. For many people, its their only foothold into the world of macros and programming, even if its via VBA horribleness.