Reported by 2 outlets
The story so far
AI summary of the reporting below · Updated · How we work
A Danish government pilot aimed at breaking away from Microsoft Office has quietly ended without any plans to revive it. Initiated in June 2025 by then Digitization Minister Caroline Stage to lessen reliance on American technology, the test involved 38 staff volunteers who traded Microsoft applications for Collabora, an open-source office suite based on LibreOffice. [1][2]
Internal records show that testers quickly ran into frustrating technical hurdles when Danish firm cBrain integrated Collabora into the ministry's F2 case-handling system. The software lacked the Georgia font used in internal templates, turned random letters bold, inserted stray line breaks, and caused files from the finance ministry to open completely blank. Users also struggled with tracking changes and formatting, while pressing the print shortcut printed the entire screen rather than the document itself. [1][2]
The experiment came to an unceremonious halt when Denmark called an election in early 2026, leading to a government reorganization. A spokesperson confirmed the pilot was never formally evaluated before being discarded, drawing criticism from academic observers who hoped the public sector would learn from the trial as European peers like Switzerland and the Netherlands pursue their own open-source transitions. [1][2]
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...
via TechSpot
The Danish digitization ministry experimented with Collabora as an alternative to Microsoft Office, but employees who used them were frequently frustrated with style and paragraph formatting challenges, among other complaints.
via Tom’s Hardware