Denmark gives up on replacing Microsoft Office, for now

Winners & losers

When Denmark's digitalization minister announced last summer that her own staff would start ditching Microsoft Office, the news traveled far beyond Danish media. Her ministry was supposed to go first and show other public bodies that leaving American software behind was doable.

That experiment has now quietly ended. Nobody at the ministry uses the replacement today, and there are no plans to bring it back.

Early reports had the whole ministry ditching Microsoft Office by the end of 2025, but what launched on June 19 was a lot more modest - a pilot with 38 volunteers from the department.

Those testers swapped Word for Collabora, an open-source office suite built on LibreOffice. Danish software firm cBrain plugged it into F2, its case-handling system that ministry staff already use to write and file documents.

cBrain said the idea was to see whether Collabora could cope with templates, formatting, tracked changes, and conversions to and from Word.

Pilot troubles

Sadly, internal emails and notes that Danish engineering outlet Ingeniøren obtained through a records request show the testers ran into trouble almost immediately.

Within an hour of getting access, one of them was asking how to hide a pile of extra text styles her Word templates had kept out of sight. Digging into that turned up a bigger gap, since Collabora didn't even have Georgia, the font her templates relied on.

Even after cBrain added it, random letters turned bold. Stray line breaks also kept creeping into documents. A few files from the finance ministry opened completely blank. Pressing Ctrl+P printed the entire window rather than the document.

By September, one tester wrote that she was going gray over how much time she spent fixing styles.

All of this was supposed to come to a head at an evaluation workshop in October 2025. An internal memo laid out four possible outcomes, from going all in on Collabora to deciding it wasn't mature enough yet.

Instead, the testers simply kept using it into this year. The project was then cut short this spring, when Denmark called a general election that brought in a new government.

A press officer for what's now the Ministry of Research, Education and Digitalization told Ingeniøren the pilot was never evaluated as planned.

What’s next elsewhere

Meanwhile, fewer than ten employees at the Danish Road Safety Authority have been working on open-source PCs since last December. They're testing SIA Open, a setup from government IT agency Statens IT. Once its third release lands in February 2027, any of the 166 organizations the agency serves should be able to order one.

Further afield, Switzerland is spending millions to move federal PCs from Microsoft 365 to openDesk. The Netherlands is going a step further by building its own Linux distro for government machines.