Denmark's bid to ditch Office for open-source collapses in under six months

Denmark’s Ministry of Digitization launched a 2025 pilot to reduce reliance on U.S. technology by replacing Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel with Collabora, an open-source office suite based on LibreOffice. The trial involved 38 employees and had to work with the ministry’s existing case-management system. It reportedly ended in less than six months, before an early election in February 2026 and after the ministry was merged into a larger department. Staff cited practical problems with document styles and paragraph formatting, unwanted blank pages, and tracking changes. The effort’s rapid end suggests that a limited trial of one alternative did not establish whether open-source office software could meet the government’s needs.

The pilot’s shortcomings remain unclear because the ministry has not publicly shared a proper evaluation. Copenhagen Business School professor Mikkel Flyberbom says testing alternatives was worthwhile but argues that the government should document what it learned for other public agencies. Collabora was selected without a reported comparison against options such as OnlyOffice, OpenOffice, or Calligra, leaving unanswered whether another product might have worked better. Replacing Office in a large bureaucracy also involves more than basic document editing: shared files, templates, spreadsheets, macros, databases, and established workflows may all depend on Microsoft software. The failed trial therefore leaves both the technical barriers and the quality of the testing unresolved, rather than demonstrating that open-source alternatives cannot succeed.