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Danish Government silently drops plan to dump MS Office

What HN thinks

Europe announces its Microsoft exit for the twentieth time; Microsoft's sales team takes another victory lap.

Office is genuinely hard to replace
Excel power use, VBA, load-bearing spreadsheets, mail merge and format fidelity keep organisations on Microsoft, and open source alternatives still fall short on the last 10%.
It's politics, lobbying and negotiation
Many see the pilot as a bargaining chip for licence discounts, killed conveniently by an election, with lobbying and bureaucratic inertia doing the rest.
Users resist change, not software
Some argue LibreOffice is good enough and the real obstacles are habit, training demands and treating Microsoft's behaviour as the standard.

Consensus: Most agree that replacing Office takes more than a decent alternative: compatibility, migration tooling and organisational will are the real bottlenecks, and none were present here.

Recommended in the comments

LibreOffice ↗ (product): Suggested as the actively maintained successor to OpenOffice and a capable replacement for most users.
OnlyOffice (product): Praised for a better UI and keyboard keytips than LibreOffice.
gLabels ↗ (tool): Offered as a fix for mail-merge label printing from CSV files.
Grist (service): Suggested as a better process than abusing spreadsheets.
La Suite numérique ↗ (product): Cited as an example of a government funding its own alternatives.

Summarised by Claude from the comment thread 1 day ago.

Points: 168
Comments: 156
Best rank: #9
Posted: 2026-10-24 by lowkeyokay
Category: Open source

collabora microsoft-office denmark digital-sovereignty government-it cbrain

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Full page

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Danish Ministry Replaces Windows and Microsoft Office with Linux and LibreOffice (heise.de)

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