Denmark’s bid to ditch Microsoft Office for open-source alternative Collabora collapses in under six months
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.
Denmark's Ministry of Digitization, now known as the Ministry for Research, Education, and Digitization, ended its attempt to replace Microsoft Office with open-source software after just six months. The pilot project, launched in 2025 by then-Digitization Minister Caroline Stage, involved 38 employees who were supposed to use the British open-source Collabora office suite instead of Microsoft's Word, PowerPoint, and Excel.
Despite the idea of reducing dependence on American technology, the experiment reportedly ended before Denmark's February 2026 early election. Issues with formatting, blank pages, and tracking changes were cited as cause for complaints. Professor Mikkel Flyberbom of the Copenhagen Business School expressed disappointment that the project was not properly evaluated, stating that it's valuable to test alternatives in pilot projects but hopes the ministry can share its experiences.
Collabora was chosen for the project, but it's unclear why this specific open-source alternative was selected over others like OnlyOffice, OpenOffice, or Calligra. The Danish government opted for open-source alternatives to Microsoft Office in its testing, but it's not clear why only those were chosen. The failure of the open-source experiment remains unexplained.
Written by urgent.news from Tom's Hardware's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
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