That depends on your workload. I've been using Excel since 1993, and I find the things I've listed help me get things done just as well as Excel does, unless I have a pile of macros and vbscript I need to interop with.

This is not theoretical; I learned it by needing to get shit done in a context where having an activated copy of Excel wasn't practical. Excel was paralleled and in one case surpassed.