David McRitchie shared this with us in microsoft.public.excel.newusers:

Open Office (openoffice.org) 49MB won't do macros,

David,

That is *not* true! OpenOffice /will/ do "macros". Just fire up any
OpenOffice app and go to Tools -- Macros. You see?

Currently OpenOffice has support for:
* OpenOffice.org Basic
* Python
* BeanShell
* JavaScript

That means compared to MSOffice 3 programming/scripting languages more
to choose from!

OpenOffice.org Basic is essentially the same as Visual Basic for
Applications - but the MSOffice and OpenOffice object models are
totally different, so any VBA macro would have to be converted to use
the new objects. The algorithms (the "real" programming goo) would
remain the same.

--
Amedee Van Gasse