Danish Government silently drops plan to dump MS Office
computerworld.dk
computerworld.dk
Faithfully transferring those files, permissions, edit histories and metadata to new clouds will require a kind of guerrilla warfare called “adversarial interoperability.” Adversarial interoperability is the process of making a new thing work with an existing thing, against the wishes of the existing thing’s manufacturer" https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2025-11-26...
It's getting pretty close to a reality that cloud services are vulnerable regardless of tech. They might have to abandon all cloud hopes.
Ultimately, AI will allow that. Going the other direction, AI will multiply the vendor lickin effect 100x.
So which way you going?
But people aren't looking for AWS, they're looking for Office 365.
The article mentions that the (38) test persons had reported some frustrations with typography, and track-changes during the test.
I’d even go as far as arguing that it’s priced very fairly and rather low compared to software of similar complexity. It’s priced low enough that pretty much any business of any size can justify the cost.
I use OnlyOffice to handle documents and spreadsheets when I need to, but if I was doing that on a daily basis I’d absolutely pay for an Office license.
Best Latvian office suite?
(I am quite aware of the controversy around the suite but I don’t think the controversy has enough meat on its bones for me to care about it, especially when I barely use these applications as it stands. I just really don’t like LibreOffice by comparison in terms of the UI and overall experience.)
Nothing is more compatible with ms office than ms office.
But in terms of features it's not really any different than office 2000. The ribbons were introduced and Excel sheets can be bigger but it's really just the same. There's hardly been any innovation. That's what Microsoft do when they own a market, they just sit back. It happened to internet explorer and it happened to office.
Anyone else would have made a better product if it weren't a non-starter.
As an example: in my job Excel is not used for numbers but abused as a database. It really deeply sucks at that, you need to copy paste vlookups and it chokes on a few hundred thousand rows. On a modern computer that's ridiculous. It doesn't enforce type integrity and sometimes people type over vlookups breaking the formula in that row.
"Formatting as table" is a bit of a workaround and changes a lot more than just "formatting" implies. But it doesn't solve the core issue which is that this is just the wrong tool for the job, period. It just smoothes over some of the ridiculous workarounds.
Any company that cared would either make it do databases better, or would find out why users don't grok the actual database product, ms access, and keep abusing a spreadsheet for this purpose. They would improve the database product so it would be great to use. And port it to all platforms, ms never bothered to port it to Mac.
Access is difficult because it's too closely tied to SQL concepts. And thus a complex 70s mindset hell bent on minimising data storage. This could be so greatly reinvented, wouldn't necessarily have to be an RDBMS. The only reason people screw around with excel is because they know it. Not because it's actually good for this purpose.
Another example: they never fixed the CSV-semicolon issue outside of the US or the ambiguity of translated function names.
https://www.onlyoffice.com XLSX, XLS, ODS, CSV, TXT
https://www.libreoffice.org ods, ots, fods, xlsx, xlsm, xls, xlt, xml, csv, dif, dbf, slk
But I'm much to impressed by Modern CSV
https://www.moderncsv.com CSV, JSON, XML
I like CSV for not trying to be an incompetent version of SQL
But now with AI I guess you could just ask it to debug the issue and it would decompile Word in 5 minutes and pull out the fix.
Not sure what the frustrations with typography were, but I recon they're a lot easier to fix now.
If we care so much about that it actually looks the same after all that time, why is it not a pdf?
I’m so confused that anyone would get hung up enough about this to let it block a migration of this size.
In many ways, recent LLM stuff is just the same process as how Excel took over the world.
Also largely microsoft's doing. They're big on backwards compatibility/legacy support (except sometimes for when it gets in the way of greed) and in doing so have largely trained all those people using Office Products to expect just that. It's part of their entrenchment/momentum strategy.
Doesn't help that American corporate culture in general seems to have adopted (enforced?) that expectation as well. Though that's a little bit of a chicken-and-egg situation so not sure where to score the blame there.
Like the other commenter said, lot of companies depend on loadbearing spreadsheets because it's cheaper than a salary. Not saying it's necessarily a good idea, but it happens enough that it's a known market force.
You just said why. A migration of this size needs to make sure "nothing happened in the meantime". If it can't, then any issues or lost record or other kinds of data for accountability are brought into question.
>If we care so much about that it actually looks the same after all that time, why is it not a pdf?
yet another proprietary format?
And honestly, the true answer is probably much more diappointing than any theory I can throw out. Legacy code is rarely about "what's the best approach for the long term?", so I can only imagine legacy documents being much worse about this.
As much as I despise Microsoft, I admit that their Office suite is pretty good. Or at least it used to be - the last version I used was 2010 I think. I can't belive that 365 has regressed so much. Seems like shoehorning an Office suite into a webbrowser wasn't a great idea.
About 25 years ago Palo Alto bought a new email system. Exchange, a huge dual-processor HP system, about 100K in today’s dollars. I went to a council meeting to ask and was directed to the decision maker. He said the big cost would be training: outlook/exchange’s icons looked like the familiar Word/excel ones so few people felt they’d need training, while the Netscape buttons were larger and looked different and everybody felt they’d need a training course.
I ought this would go away as those afraid of computers aged out, especially since the arrival of smart phones with their different iconography. But it seems not.
in my experience there might be a few people for whom "the icons are different, i need a training course" is a legitimate concern. but for the vast majority of workers, it's not "i need a training course" it's "i feel like i can get away with demanding a training course" with the full knowledge that asking for a training course will derail the effort to make a change.
Yeah, there are people who think that they are being paid to be at work, not to do work, to apply themselves, to engage, to provide and produce. And it sucks to work with those kinds of people.
Then a coworker showed an even more sophisticated version of the same joke. He created a nearly identical relationship but he would look for job offers matching their resume and pitch them. Look, this is closer to where you live and the pay is better!
Stick to conventions, don't reinvent the wheel, and training needs should be minimal.
Very few people who know MS Office could not pick up LibreOffice and be fine with it.
That has not had an actual release for something like 12 years, and has had known unaddressed security vulnerabilities for... what is it now, a year? Two years?
That is a dead project. Please Tell your mom to tell her bosses they really should switch to LibreOffice. Which is simply the continued development of the same thing. The municipality can write the Document Foundation and ask for assistance:
https://thedocumentfoundation.org/
and there are of course commercial companies which do LO transitions too.
The last OpenOffice release was 10 days ago. Not 12 years.
We propagandize them against all alternatives, like Russian energy and Chinese everything, and employ all of their academics and politicians at our nonprofits and universities, sprinkling credentials all over them. Europeans love a credential; makes them feel superior. Money well spent.
The opinion is that "the public workers don't need it" for every feature missing in Linux or LibreOffice. I can only imagine how a fight to upstream such features would look like even if someone took on a support contract.
With Microsoft at least the governments get shared fate with large corpos who also need enterprise features.
I'm just a freelancer with FLOSS experience and some commercial experience, and so are plenty other FLOSS contributors. Nobody's going to create a company and hire staff just to have a chance at getting selected in the one tender a year that allows outsiders in.
The idea might be that only companies which have already proven themselves elsewhere can enter, but 1) then why the "public sector work revenue" requirement? And 2) that's not going to work for industries where government interest is much larger than private interest, like FLOSS.
But I suppose governments prefer the certainty that Accenture or local equivalents bring - a price an order of magnitude too high for a mediocre result and a 25% chance that the project will be fucked up and shelved, over the uncertainty of a small startup, who could either deliver something great, or overexert themselves and not finish at all...
It also helps to be flexible with the truth. If you get this one million dollar tender then you'll be doing one million dollars of business with the government so you can check that box.
If you meet all checkboxes, have the lowest price and still don't get the tender, you can usually sue the government for corruption. These processes are strictly regulated to avoid that.
Also here you can't sue directly, you can file a complaint with the oversight bureau, which regularly happens just because a competitor is mad at not being selected, but that's a different problem...
To get the average office worker to want to switch, you not only have to provide a finished product that works smoothly, but also one that feels familiar. Most office workers grind through their day doing repetitive tasks in familiar software they have been using for a decade. When the top of the food chain says they are overhauling the entire software suite that people have been grown accustomed to for their entire career, the new software better have real benefits that incentivise employees to actually engage with learning it. Otherwise productivity will simply crater.
Most office workers do not care to learn new software. They just want to get on with their job. For better or for worse. But if you can demonstrate a switch will make their lives easier and the UI UX of the new software is very familiar and intuitive (and it actually works) you may be able to pull off a clean switch and keep your employees happy.
An MVP is fine but I think it's crucial that the UI UX is very similar to the software that it is replacing because it means people don't have to relearn whatever habits they have developed over the years in the old stack. I think that's what creates the most resistance to change.
People pay a lot of money for professional versions anyway.
> Cloud collaborative text editor and sheets and storage is all you really need. Plenty of good alternatives to Teams.
If the quotation were correct, the things I listed would always be, instead of sometimes being.
Google Docs and OpenOffice* have been alternatives to MS Office that were actually used in places I've worked, too.
* this was before LibraOffice
https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-microsoft-teams-alternati...
> Absolute shit.
> The U.S. would “instantly” win a hypothetical tech war, an official moaned.
EU just has a long way to go. And the reality is that it will be so astronomically expensive that it is unlikely that they ever even truly try.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation_of_shopkeepers
It starts in Wealth of Nations, was picked up by a French revolutionary (still aimed at England, but in a more negative way), and Ben Franklin said something similar about Holland.
Everyone in Europe is saying that the CCP is illegally subsidizing EVs and solar panels to conquer the European market, and that we need to protect from them by imposing tariffs: but if you think about it, this isn't too different from what America is doing with tech.
American big tech companies have to pay their workers a lot more than European tech companies.
Microsoft has to pay local taxes on sales in those countries. They are not paying American tax rates on European sales.
Even their American corporate tax rates, if raised to European levels, would still have ample room for profit.
Your argument is not supported by the data.
> but if you think about it, this isn't too different from what America is doing with tech.
It’s nothing like economic dumping. America is not pumping money into Microsoft to dump Microsoft Office into European markets.
Those European companies could come to the US, open an office here, and be under the exact same rules as Microsoft.
The situation is not alike at all.
Nobody was talking about sales tax.
The collusion of US big tech with Ireland to pay very little taxes is well documented. You mention many unrelated facts that are mostly irrelevant to the discussion.
Further, America has definitely been pumping money into Microsoft, for instance with hefty defense and public administration contracts. It is incredibly naive to believe that the US allowed the Microsoft monopoly to corner the office market without the opportunity of establishing a digital hegemony being a significant factor.
The situation is, in fact, quite alike to chinese state-sponsored companies. The main difference being the tone of media coverage about it in the western world.
That's not a subsidy. That's a customer paying for a product. Apart from that, the USA has Anti-Trust laws, and Microsoft has been at the receiving end of these in the past.
And yes Anti-Trust laws and enforcement exist in theory, and occasionally get applied, leading to small fines. Which is in line with what I wrote. Anti-Trust action has been severely lacking, and I assume that was by design.
Can you evidence this?
Just fire the naysayers (for refusing to work) and you have one problem less.
But I think the hardest thing to replace is Active Directory, Outlook, all the integration with Windows, all the admins certified on Microsoft technology. It's not about the actual application "MS Office", it's about all of IT (that line was not AI).
Nah, it's the users. Those are resistant to change even more. When they miss deadlines that they can now blame, sometimes rightfully, on the software change
If it's AI ... the whole point this version of AI was invented was translation. That's what transformers are for. So why don't they build versions of the apps and pages in every language under the sun from Aztec to Zaparo, from Hieroglyphics to Cuneiform?
Despite what you hear techies say, "really bad software" didn't really exist before, except for some very small enterprise niches. Stuff like Windows, Photoshop or other categories that techies complain, has always hovered between "bad" and "above average" with some moments of hitting "quite good". Really bad software was software that barely did its main job.
Well, really bad software is now super cheap to create.
That won't really change software economics outside of corporate malpractice (those small enterprise niches) or regulatory capture.
Average software is probably only marginally cheaper and good software will be as expensive as always because expectations have shifted up.
Implementation was never the bottleneck. The hard part is about usability engineering, which requires feedback cycles with actual users to have good results. That's a hard, time-consuming process; merely dogfooding the product won't work.
I am not sure about the word choice, but they, ...
> European governments
probably like BDSM or something.
There is no technical reason to be impossible, the issue is political.
Corruption promoted by American lobbies onto European government and preventing any actual decision.
When people in charge “have balls”, it does work.
"Rumours that Denmark has abandoned seeking alternatives to Microsoft Office do not reflect what we’re hearing on the ground. There was an election in Denmark earlier this year, and as a result of that and ministry changes, the Collabora Online trial at the Ministry of Digital Affairs by cBrain, our integration partners, is paused. We understand it's due to start again with a new stakeholder group before the end of the year.
“The problems cited by some press recently, were addressed last year, and throughout the trial Collabora Office has worked to satisfy the needs of the Ministry of Digital Affairs (now merged into the Ministry for Research, Education and Digitalization) and our partner, cBrain.”
“Collabora Office began work on the trial in July 2025. In the interests of advancing Open Source software use within government, we supplied an 80-user enterprise account for free to facilitate the test, and our senior engineers have been involved in investigating and resolving reported issues. We are pleased to participate in this trial and look forward to hearing the Ministry’s findings.”
I'll add that Computerworld.dk’s original report was accurate, but some follow-ups connected it to the older problems without contacting us. Happy to answer questions (hopefully, I can answer them).
I hate Microsoft. I hate having to use Windows. But nobody in the free software community has ever made this not a nightmare. I suppose I might take a picture of the fucked up product and ask Claude if it can fix my fucking labels. That might actually work.
that never existed. While Microsoft has published a specification of their file formats, the never described how to render them. So a clone cannot make it look like Microsoft Office.
Blame it on Microsoft. Stop the vendor lockin and leave Microsoft today
This post explicitly details one practical reason why I, alongside every physical office on earth, cannot leave Microsoft today. I would bet a lot that this is not the only reason, it's just the lowest hanging one that I can see.
> So a clone cannot make it look like Microsoft Office.
If this problem is intractable then we're never getting rid of MS Office. But I suspect that it is not, and that someone likely can reverse engineer the secret rendering sauce, especially in the age of AI.
Alternatively, people need to lobby the label producers for templates that work with free software alternatives.
Can be used it with a thermal label printer and with generic label sheets if you are willing to hand tweak templates.
It’s ridiculous, that an all continent with probably the best educated people on the planet it’s completely stalled for 2 decades now in the hands of some bureocrats in Brussels.
In fact, its worst than ridiculous, it’s shameful.
Moving to LibreOffice cannot be a money-saving exercise if it's going to work. It has to be a political priority.
While writing this, the thought occurs that having a single authority and regulator puts little checks on the amount of regulation. Whereas multiple competing countries could limit it to not have their own industries at a disadvantage. The EU, of course, has this in relation to China, US, etc., so I don’t know…
Any day now.
Also somebody to call (or sue) when it doesn't work right.
Also, MS doesn't care anymore since they have the monopoly. Things go wrong? Tough shit you won't migrate somewhere else anyway, and will continue to spend millions for licences.
Instead we're being extorted by Microsoft for buggy software
Basically all Microsoft software is bad. It’s obtuse, slow, unintuitive garbage. But people get very used to it, and are fantastic at navigating around and getting their job done. I should hope so, they’ve had decades.
There is also LibreOffice.
Why is that money not used to complement LibreOffice here?
These can be separate repositories. I am sure there are many human developers who would write a ton of useful bridge-code to make things work. And LibreOffice would also be improved.
Are there lobbyists blocking this?
Possibly some of the newer technologies (to avoid the first and third vowels in the Roman Alphabet) will one day bring liberty.
Also wonder if this is eg MS offering a good deal at the eleventh hour to stop it going ahead, or if they called their bluff
I have a feeling that those threats to move away from MS Office just a way to negotiate a better price.
https://github.com/scosman/freecell
So far it’s GPU accelerated (GPUI), cross platform, supports 95% of excel functions, supports charts, is about 40x faster than Numbers, and can render 240fps.
I thought I’d leave this process with a new appreciation for manual dev/details. I haven’t found that yet. I’m getting more into architecture details, writing more benchmarks, testing more. I know there are limits, but I’m still trying to find them.
It would be absolute garbage if I wasn’t already an engineer. It probably is absolute garbage in ways I don’t know because I haven’t read the code. But the app is… quite good. If someone invested into something like this full-time for 6 months it's hard to imagine what you'd need excel for.
But this collision seems inauspicious.
The card game and computer version predate windows -- it's not a MSFT creation.
(but I did not downvote, I suspect that's other peoples' opinions about your optimism :)
That says it all; that governments run with this "pakke".
I al stilhed har Digitaliseringsministeriet droppet sit ellers meget omtalte pilotprojekt med et open souce-baseret alternativ til Microsofts Office-pakke, som ministeriet ellers anvender i stor stil.
Projektet blev søsat i sommeren 2025, da knap 40 medarbejdere i ministeriet gik i gang med at teste open source-systemet Collabora som alternativ til Office. Systemet blev dengang leveret af danske cBrain.
Dengang sagde daværende digitaliseringsminister Caroline Stage (M), at pilotprojektet var et 'kærkomment skridt i den rigtige retning' frem mod at frigøre sig fra afhængigheden af Microsoft opg at hun ønskede at hendes ministerie skulle være spydspids for frigørelsen fra amerikansk teknologi. Det kan du læse mere om her: Her er den løsning, som skal erstatte Microsoft Office for alle medarbejdere i Digitaliseringsministeriet
Nu meddeler en pressemedarbejder til Version2, at projektet blev droppet, da der blev udskrevet valg i foråret.
Og der er ingen planer om at genoptage det, hedder det. Projektet er ikke blevet evalueret som det ellers var planen.
Og det ærger professor Mikkel Flyverbom fra CBS.
"Det er en fin ide at afprøve alternativer i et pilotprojekt. Jeg ville dog ønske, at ministeriet benyttede muligheden for at lære af pilotprojektet og dele de erfaringer med andre dele af den offentlige sektor," skriver han i en mail til mediet.
Digitaliseringsministeriets departement er i dag lagt sammen med andre ministerier, så ministeriet i dag hedder Forsknings-, Uddannelses-, og Digitaliseringsminister med Christina Egelund som minister.
Med afslutning ved valgudskrivelsen i slutningen af februar 2026 nåede open source-piloten kun at være i luften i godt et halvt års tid.
Pilotprojektet koblede Collabora ind i ministeriets centrale sagsbehandlingssystem, F2, der leveres af danske cBrain, og det var planen, at de 38 test-ansatte allerede fra første dag skulle udarbejde ministeriets dokumenter, præsentationer og tabeller uden Microsofts Word, PowerPoint og Excel.
Særligt funktioner som ’track changes’ og konvertering mellem Microsoft-formater og open source-formater bliver noget af det, ministeriet vil arbejde med i testperioden, hed det dengang.
Pilotprojektet skulle afklare, om britiske Collabora overhovedet kunne understøtte ministeriets arbejdsgange og behov på tilfredsstillende vis. Det står i dag uklart, om det har været tilfældet, da projektet ikke er blevet evalueret.
Der var dog flere historier fremme om, at Collabora-projektet havde ført til visse frustrationer blandt ministeriet ansatte.
Blandt andet har der været med formateringer af typografier, afsnitsformateringer, blanke sider og udfordringer med track changes.