Denmark’s bid to ditch Microsoft Office for open-source alternative Collabora collapses in under six months
Denmark's Ministry of Digitization, which has since been merged with other ministries and is now called the Ministry for Research, Education, and Digitization, has reportedly ended its experiment to replace Microsoft Office with an open-source alternative. According to Danish publication Computerworld [machine translated], the pilot project was launched in 2025 and involved 38 employees, all of whom would start using the British open-source Collabora office suite instead of Word, PowerPoint, and Excel.
The experiment was initiated by the then Digitization Minister Caroline Stage, who wanted to reduce the country's dependence on American technology. Denmark isn't alone in moving away from U.S. software, with France and the Netherlands both taking steps to replace Microsoft Windows. However, it seemed that the experiment fizzled out less than six months after it started. It had reportedly ended by the time the Danish government called for an early election in February 2026, with some employees complaining about issues with style, paragraph formatting, blank pages, and challenges with tracking changes.
But even though it's been months since the experiment reportedly ended, Prof. Mikkel Flyberbom of the Copenhagen Business School complains that the project hasn't been properly evaluated. It's a good idea to test alternatives in a pilot project," the professor said in an email. However, I wish that the ministry would take the opportunity to learn from the pilot project and share those experiences with other parts of the public sector."
The Microsoft Office alternative had to work with the then Ministry of Digitization's central case management system called F2, but it's unclear why it only chose Collabora for the project. While Collabora is based on LibreOffice, which is one of the most popular and mature open-source alternatives to Microsoft's office suite, there are also several other alternatives it could have tested, like OnlyOffice, OpenOffice, and Calligra. There have also been recent attempts to use AI to create open-source versions of subscription-based software like Microsoft 365 and the Adobe Creative Suite, but governments would likely want to choose a reliable and stable build instead of these experimental AI-built apps.
It's still a mystery why the Danish government chose to work with only open-source Microsoft Office alternatives in its testing. It probably would've been better if different teams used three alternatives and then the project proponents conducted a review after the testing period to determine the best solution. Nevertheless, the question is moot with the apparent failure of the open-source experiment.