All lies.
I work at IBM, and I have heard no such thing.
As for "330,000 use Symphony" - everyone gets a computer with Symphony pre-installed. Nobody I know ever uses it - ever. We all use MS Office, and have not been told to stop.
In Excel, if you're entering data, you press 'tab' to move to the next column, and when you're done with that row, you press Return and it kicks you down and back into the leftmost column. Very handy, since it saves you a mouse movement or many left-arrow presses to get back to the start column. At least the last version of OO Calc I played with didn't mimic this behavior properly---pressing Return just dropped to the next row in the same column, even after entering several columns of data.
Excel may not be the greatest program in the world (let's be honest, it's a bloated monster), but it does a few things right.