Denmark's attempt to move a government ministry off Microsoft Office has reportedly ended after less than six months, according to Danish outlet Computerworld.
The pilot started in 2025 at the Ministry of Digitization, which has since been merged into the Ministry for Research, Education, and Digitization. It covered 38 employees, who were to use Collabora, a British open-source suite built on LibreOffice, in place of Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. Then Digitization Minister Caroline Stage launched it to reduce Denmark's dependence on American technology. The software also had to work with F2, the ministry's central case management system.
The experiment had reportedly ended by the time the government called an early election in February 2026. Employees complained about style, paragraph formatting, blank pages, and tracking changes.
That last item deserves more weight than the others. Tracking changes is how drafts move between many hands in a ministry, so a flaw there costs more than a cosmetic glitch. Our read, not Computerworld's: the pilot tested one suite on a small group, so it says little about open-source office software in general. It is also unclear why Collabora was the only candidate, when OnlyOffice, OpenOffice, and Calligra were available. Running several in parallel would have given a better answer.
Denmark is not alone in this push. France and the Netherlands have both taken steps to replace Microsoft Windows, and they would benefit from a clear account of what went wrong.
Prof. Mikkel Flyberbom of the Copenhagen Business School said in an email that the project hasn't been properly evaluated. "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," he said. Until the ministry does, nobody outside can tell whether the fault lay with Collabora, the F2 integration, or the design of the trial.