Danish Government silently drops plan to dump MS Office

(computerworld.dk)

152 points | by lowkeyokay 3 hours ago

20 comments

  • gumby 19 minutes ago
    It’s hard to parse the complaints in these transitions. Sometimes there has to be a change in process, sure, or even some genuine incompatibility. But a huge percent is social.

    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.

    • notatoad 11 minutes ago
      >everybody felt they’d need a training course.

      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.

      • wildzzz 0 minutes ago
        That's exactly what I've said when someone has suggested moving away from my favorite tool to their favorite tool. I've literally said "Uh, don't forget, we'll likely need an 8 hour training course for a dozen engineers.", saw the numbers crunching in the PM's head and then they'll say "Maybe we'll circle back on moving to X, I'll need to request more funding for next year."
      • nickpeterson 7 minutes ago
        I find that people who demand or complain about training tends to be a really good filter for people that are hard to work with or intellectually incurious.
  • bpalmerau 17 minutes ago
    "Any serious attempt at digital sovereignty needs migration tools that work without the cooperation of the Big Tech companies. Otherwise, this is like building housing for East Germans and locating it in West Berlin. It doesn't matter how great the housing is, your intended audience is going to really struggle to move in unless you tear down the wall." Cory Doctorow https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition
    • bpalmerau 10 minutes ago
      "...the Eurostack’s proponents are really working on the preliminaries to digital sovereignty. It’s not enough to have alternatives to US Big Tech. There also needs to be extensive work on migration tools, to facilitate the move to those alternatives. No one is going to manually copy/paste a million documents out of their ministry or corporation’s GSuite repository and into a Eurostack equivalent. There are a few tools that do this today, but they’re crude and hard to use, because they are probably illegal under America’s widely exported IP laws.

      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...

  • lowkeyokay 2 hours ago
    According to the article the Agency for Digital Government (Digitaliseringsstyrelsen) initiated a pilot in spring 2025 to use Collabora[1]. A General Election was called (not related) which put the project on hold indefinitely. No plan to pick it up agian, and no evaluation is planned.

    The article mentions that the (38) test persons had reported some frustrations with typography, and track-changes during the test.

    1: https://www.collaboraonline.com/

    • Grombobulous 51 minutes ago
      I also love the idea of ditching Microsoft and I have done so for my personal life, but if your work day lives and breathes documents, spreadsheets, and slide decks, there really is no better option out there than Microsoft Office.

      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.

      • lakeviewterrace 47 minutes ago
        > OnlyOffice

        Best Latvian office suite?

        • sfRattan 22 minutes ago
          Not OP, but I like OnlyOffice for its keytips support (tap alt and then the whole ribbon gives you live hints for navigating and executing UI functions/buttons with the keyboard). Far ahead of LibreOffice, at least at the moment.
        • Grombobulous 44 minutes ago
          It sure is!

          (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.)

    • thomasahle 29 minutes ago
      It used to be near impossible for Open Office to get documents 100% right when opening old files saved with Microsoft Word 95 or whatever.

      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.

      • spockz 12 minutes ago
        But why do we have such a (imho unfounded) desire to be a be able to open a file in a proprietary format from 30 years ago and expect to be able to edit it like nothing happened in the mean time?

        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.

    • tokai 1 hour ago
      Its an old classic using an election to kill off or stall projects in ministries or public institutions. I bet some bureaucrat or Statens It doesn't want the trouble of this moving along.
  • kjuulh 1 hour ago
    My mom still uses OpenOffice at her job (municipality), and honestly they haven't really felt a huge difference, they still get their work done like before, but heck there were some training to do as they were switching. I suspect at this point they would need the same training just to get back to word etc.
    • einpoklum 45 minutes ago
      > OpenOffice

      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.

      • kjuulh 32 minutes ago
        It might actually have been Libra. It was part of the whole get away from MS thing.
  • feldrim 43 minutes ago
    Most of the govt stuff is paperwork moved to "digital" paperwork using office. I sincerely hope to see a post with a title "X govt drops using any office program at all". Most of these stuff can be just CRUD apps on approval workflows with built-in digital signatures. Govt officers would not need more than browsers for majority of these daily tasks.
  • arkensaw 6 minutes ago
    I don't get this. Of all the software suites out there, MS Office must be the easiest to replace. LibreOffice does everything needed, and its free. It's a no brainer.
  • sanskritical 2 hours ago
    I send a fair amount of physical mailings. This requires me to do a mail merge from a spreadsheet to adhesive labels. I will buy whatever brand of inkjet paper filled with adhesive labels is the cheapest at that given time. The manufacturer gives a template for the labels. Every year or so I will check the feasibility of switching to LibreOffice or OnlyOffice or whatever the thing people say is the open source future of office software is. I will try to do this same exact action, which every office in the world likely does a significant number of times per year. Every year, once I figure out how to mail merge (sometimes, a drastically different process in the interface, whereas Microsoft has kept this relatively intuitive throughout the ages) I end up with misaligned labels on a sheet of ruined label paper, despite the alleged format compatibility of the open source alternatives.

    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.

    • tau255 19 minutes ago
      Have you tried [0]? It can source values from CSV file and after configuring a label and sheet template you should be able to use it to print filled labels.

      Can be used it with a thermal label printer and with generic label sheets if you are willing to hand tweak templates.

      [0] https://glabels.org/

    • reedciccio 17 minutes ago
      You could try changing your process, use something like getgrist.com.
    • orangesilk 51 minutes ago
      > despite the alleged format compatibility

      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

    • gavmor 1 hour ago
      At what point does implementing it yourself become a savings?
      • Grombobulous 45 minutes ago
        AI agents can make quick work of a task like this and build out a bespoke script to get it done. However, at that point you’ve shifted a 365 subscription cost to a Claude subscription cost (and you also get Copilot usage with either of the 365 plans anyway).
    • galaxyLogic 50 minutes ago
      Maybe there should be an app just for doing mail-merge. That should be fairly simple I assume?
    • toomuchtodo 1 hour ago
      Create a bounty, I'm in for at least a couple hundred $ in tokens to solve this, assuming MIT or copyleft license is used to avoid future commercial capture.

      https://bounties.fulu.org/

      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50167818

    • apercu 1 hour ago
      I hate to say this butt I wonder if you could just generate a CSV (I use python for this sort of thing) and send to a vendor to just make the labels for you? (Admittedly this is a North American view point) but it might actually be less effort (time for you) and cheaper.
  • fn-mote 1 hour ago
    Knew this was coming after reading the history of Microsoft in Latin America.
    • pipes 1 hour ago
      Please can you take the time to elaborate. The comment as you have left it doesn't add much without explanation. There is more and more of this on hacker news.
    • selimthegrim 1 hour ago
      Is this like the history of Coca-Cola in Latin America
      • mentalgear 1 hour ago
        Or the horrifying American Fruit Company (Chiquita now) in South America ?
        • JoeAltmaier 1 hour ago
          Who was it that sent a gunboat to Hawaii and ousted their government, then demanded it be a state. The feds resisted for a while but that's how we got Hawaii - at a fruit company mercenary gunpoint.
    • tokai 1 hour ago
      Maybe the Greenland deal had secret provisions on sticking with microsoft /s
      • penguin_booze 1 hour ago
        It's all set forth under section 1, 'Notice of invasion', subsection 3, 'conditional treatment of natives'.
  • smitty1e 10 minutes ago
    The Danish effort to emancipate themselves did not last as long as Munich's => https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux

    Possibly some of the newer technologies (to avoid the first and third vowels in the Roman Alphabet) will one day bring liberty.

  • j45 10 minutes ago
    They should have ditched it first and announced it after transition was done.
  • galaxyLogic 52 minutes ago
    Neverthelessx having the ability to use clones helps when negotiating with MS.
  • asmodeuslucifer 18 minutes ago
    I know the accounting world MUST have excel.
  • nikanj 1 hour ago
    It's been over 20 years since I saw the first announcements that the German government is moving to Linux + OpenOffice.

    Any day now.

    • Orygin 1 hour ago
      Will come the day Microsoft stops bribing politicians to stay on MS Office and Windows.
      • NetMageSCW 1 hour ago
        It will come the day open source developers prioritize the same things enterprises and governments do.
        • fsflover 1 hour ago
          Profit and popularity?
          • petcat 39 minutes ago
            Mostly just usability.

            Also somebody to call (or sue) when it doesn't work right.

        • Orygin 1 hour ago
          Yeah you're absolutely right, pretty sure the bribes have nothing to do with it and it's because open source is worse. /s
          • oskcwidjwjxjwjj 57 minutes ago
            I mean, the bribes have absolutely everything to do with it but so does the fact that open source alternatives more often than not fall painfully short.
            • cicko 31 minutes ago
              You can always make something better in your spare time.
  • pessimizer 2 hours ago
    European governments have been pretending to drop Microsoft for 20 years, I suppose the first one that did it got a big discount, and now they do it whenever they want to reduce costs. Europe will never slow, and in fact will continually increase, its dependency on the US forever.

    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.

    • cowlevel 2 hours ago
      It's all well and good to evangelize but the problem is that we are only evangelizing and not actually making alternatives. Programmers tend to accept an MVP as an alternative because we can deal with the rough edges, but real users don't see it that way.
      • card_zero 2 hours ago
        The other day I was watching a manager wrestle with Excel. He couldn't select information to send it to somebody who wanted it, because it was trying to do a collaborative spreadsheet thing and had got itself locked up somehow. He ended up taking a photo of the screen and texting it.
        • spwa4 35 minutes ago
          You know, now with AI assuming the other side actually knows what they're doing this can work surprisingly well, to the point that I do it sometimes.
      • izacus 1 hour ago
        This. I've been around these kind of pushes in my part oif EU for a long time and the reality is: there's a lot of talk and demands and not many people signing up for tenders, development or maintenance work.

        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.

        • dvdkon 49 minutes ago
          I'd sign up for tenders, but they all seem to require a company with "1 million EUR revenue in public sector <whatever> projects" and 5 people with various roles, degrees and X years of experience in <whatever>.

          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...

        • nikanj 1 hour ago
          It's usually clear to all parties that the tendering process is theatre, and they've already picked the company that'll get the contract
    • kromokromo 2 hours ago
      Now that software is cheap, I don’t see why someone wouldn’t just build a clone. Cloud collaborative text editor and sheets and storage is all you really need. Plenty of good alternatives to Teams.
      • Scarblac 1 hour ago
        The French government for instance sponsors LaSuite ( https://lasuite.numerique.gouv.fr/ , no English language web page of course ).

        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).

        • hvb2 1 hour ago
          > But I think the hardest thing to replace is Active Directory, Outlook, all the integration with Windows, all the admins certified on Microsoft technology

          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

        • spwa4 32 minutes ago
          > no English language web page of course

          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?

          • schubidubiduba 6 minutes ago
            Because they can (partially) legally be held liable to the content of these pages. And because AI-translations often still feel cheap and unnatural
      • petcat 1 hour ago
        Unfortunately this is what happened when the EU tried to build their own Teams alternative:

        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.

        • fph 1 hour ago
          American big tech companies pay very few taxes, compared to European standards. This is part of what makes it difficult to compete with them.

          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.

          • Aurornis 52 minutes ago
            > American big tech companies pay very few taxes, compared to European standards. This is part of what makes it very difficult to compete with them.

            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.

          • nradov 28 minutes ago
            OK so lower corporate taxes then. Easy. If that enables European tech companies to grow and prosper then this will actually increase net tax revenue even if the rates are lower.
        • asanineassasin 1 hour ago
          Every citizen with potential to change the world- leaves europa for the us. The only "positive" exception- has been not the fat old west-west of europe, but the east. Jetbrains, CD Project Red, the svvedes- there is something subsversive and alive, software wise in the ashes of the USSR - and unlike germany and france, the old entrenched conglomerates can not sabotage that newcomers that easy there.
        • fakedang 1 hour ago
          Everything is too expensive for European bureaucrats. Funny how the Europeans used to call the fledgling US in the 1700s a nation of shopkeepers, when right now, they are an entire continent's worth of lawyers and accountants (except for France and the UK, obv).
          • card_zero 53 minutes ago
            Who aimed the "nation of shopkeepers" epithet at the US?

            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.

      • ben_w 2 hours ago
        The open-source clones already exist, and have done for a long time. As do Google Docs, which may have the disadvantages of being both closed-source and American, but the advantage of being free.

        People pay a lot of money for professional versions anyway.

        • NetMageSCW 1 hour ago
          Those are not alternatives.
          • ben_w 46 minutes ago
            For many, they are. In particular, the person I'm replying to said:

            > 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

      • lunar_rover 1 hour ago
        You can't clone decades of history.
      • oblio 1 hour ago
        > Now that software is cheap

        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.

    • jruohonen 2 hours ago
      > Europe will never slow

      I am not sure about the word choice, but they, ...

      > European governments

      probably like BDSM or something.

  • jruohonen 2 hours ago
    "alternativ til Microsoft Office-pakke"

    That says it all; that governments run with this "pakke".

  • wg0 2 hours ago
    Can't they vibe code these apps in Rust? Is AI a fad?
    • realusername 56 minutes ago
      https://getartcraft.com/apps/wordcraft

      It's happening, although it's just the beginning

    • stackghost 1 hour ago
      You can have it vibe coded, non-trivial, and good. Pick two.
      • spwa4 38 minutes ago
        They're quite usable, certainly beating MS Works at this time. They're also arguably better code somehow (e.g. startup time is very low, and unlike in MS Office I've never seen the UI lock up on a big document, everything is very responsive and very fast). Opened very complicated excel docs of mine and it looked fine, and frankly it was more enjoyable than MS Office to work with. Saving it and opening back in Excel was also just fine.

        They've also eliminated what I use Google docs for: paste some shit into docs and save as pdf, it's much, much faster at that than Google docs.

        I've written a script that deploys the wasm versions on kubernetes and makes an index page to allow to start them quickly so you can try. There's an update script that runs regularly too.

        They update like crazy too.

    • functionmouse 2 hours ago
      no

      no

  • my-huge-pony 2 hours ago
    Is there a version without a paywall?
    • privacyishuman 1 hour ago
    • ochrist 1 hour ago
      Full Danish text here:

      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.

  • s03nk3 2 hours ago
    [flagged]
  • scosman 1 hour ago
    I’m vibecoding an excel in rust just to see if it can be done and what are the limits.

    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.

    • quesera 1 hour ago
      I'm not normally one to quibble about software naming collisions, and I have literally never run MS Windows on any hardware ever in my life.

      But this collision seems inauspicious.

      • scosman 1 hour ago
        It's a spreadsheet app (cells) that's free. FreeCell. I mostly thought it was funny.

        The card game and computer version predate windows -- it's not a MSFT creation.

        • quesera 1 hour ago
          I get it, and I know it, but I still think it's more funny than good.

          (but I did not downvote, I suspect that's other peoples' opinions about your optimism :)

    • NetMageSCW 1 hour ago
      If you don’t support PowerQuery (which I don’t see mentioned for IronCalc even as a future goal) you are long way from Excel for many.
  • asanineassasin 1 hour ago
    In a world- with https://github.com/storytold/gridcraft - who still needs excell? In such a world- where its obvious that MS Office is easy replaceable with whatever some singularity demon created - longterm government migration plans like this make no sense?
    • nradov 1 hour ago
      How is the compatibility for VBA scripts? If not near 100% then it's going to be kind of useless for most enterprises.