I am afraid that I used this on my brother’s PC in Texas around 1989. I very much doubt that he still has the computer or the program, and if he has them, I doubt that the computer still works.
For landscape, go into Print preview, select Format Page, then Page and choose Landscape.
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Does that also rotate the paper 90 degrees (I’d expect it to be for printing only) ?
-I remember I found a menu item somewhere under view I think - but it’s not a problem any longer, because it’s easier just opening a file, which is ‘ready’. 
I don’t think the solution is to clean up LibreOffice; it’s definitely a capable package. The right solution would be to create an easy-to-use office-suite (Apple definitely did right with Pages and Numbers). First time you use it, you can do exactly what you want, because they’re very tidy. It’s something we must always keep in mind when we write software (in general), make sure it doesn’t get too advanced, make sure it covers all the necessary functionality (combining the two is not necessarily easy).
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I couldn’t find it, but I hunted down the menu item I used earlier; it’s under the “Format” menu, then “Page Style”, in the dialog-box, that opens, there’s a “Page” tab, clicking that reveals “Orientation” → Portrait / Landscape.
LibreOffice gets complaints both that it has too many features and that it isn’t catching up with MS Office. This means that they must be getting this right, making people from both sides unhappy 
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This is the problem. To compete with Excel, Calc needs to be as complicated as Excel. For most people, most of the time, it has much more capability than they need.
However, whenever I have tried an alternative, such as Kaligra, I found that some things I wanted were missing. So it was back to LibreOffice.
As with any complex software, the more you use it, the more you know what it can do, and where to find what you want. If you just use a spreadsheet occasionally it will be over-complicated.
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On the contrary, I find this very intuitive. Just go to (sorry, translating from other language, I don’t use it in English): Format → Page Style, then select Page tab (2nd from top) and you find Landscape or Portrait here. In my opinion, this is exactly where someone would look for this option.
Exotic indeed. The released Microsoft spreadsheet for DOS was Multiplan. Your brother must have had the CP/M and DOS Excel prototype called Odyssey. It was never released to the public.
My brain first looked for “Page Layout” but “Page Style” makes sense too. Maybe it seems intuitive to me because I remember the pre-ribbon era of Microsoft Office.
LibreOffice does have their version of a ribbon, and in that Page Orientation is in the exact same spot as in Microsoft Word. Layout Tab → Orientation (second icon). Even the tabs are in the same order as Word.
That makes sense. I never saw the program anywhere else.
It seems that MS developed it initially for DOS, then made a graphical version for the Mac because Windows either didn’t exist then or was not yet usable. All rather ironic.
by the way, why is only the “old” version 24.8.1.1 available in haikudepot, when version 26.2.3 is already available on the libreoffice website? any compilation problems? dependencies?
It takes people to get a working update last time I checked on an update I got it to build and package, but never got it to actually work, so before an update that would be the first requirement.
The current pending recipe is LibreOffice 24.8.7.2. I have LibreOffice 26.2.2.1 as well.
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