"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

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/

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.

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.

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.

China has been successful (I guess?) in switching to WPS for civil servants and state-owned companies employees. As long as you don't have to worry about 100% compatibility with MS Office, you have a lot of options. But if you are working with others using MS Office, you will get things like font issues in Word and Powerpoint, and financial models in Excel is just hopeless.

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.

Knew this was coming after reading the history of Microsoft in Latin America.

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.

Europe really can’t even do something as simple as replacing office with all the good options available, but we are pretending they are going to replace Starlink, SpaceX, Anthropic/OpenAI and Tesla…

It’s ridiculous, that an all continent with probably the best educated people on the planet it’s completely stalled for 2 decades now in the hands of some bureocrats in Brussels.

In fact, its worst than ridiculous, it’s shameful.

Lot of comments here taking this at face value, but isn’t it possible this was always a negotiation tactic on licensing costs?

Also wonder if this is eg MS offering a good deal at the eleventh hour to stop it going ahead, or if they called their bluff

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.

This isn't the first time I see news like that.

I have a feeling that those threats to move away from MS Office just a way to negotiate a better price.

Neverthelessx having the ability to use clones helps when negotiating with MS.

It's been over 20 years since I saw the first announcements that the German government is moving to Linux + OpenOffice.

Any day now.

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.

All these non US governments have a lot of money in total.

There is also LibreOffice.

Why is that money not used to complement LibreOffice here?

These can be separate repositories. I am sure there are many human developers who would write a ton of useful bridge-code to make things work. And LibreOffice would also be improved.

Are there lobbyists blocking this?

They should have ditched it first and announced it after transition was done.

"alternativ til Microsoft Office-pakke"

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

I know the accounting world MUST have excel.

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.

Is there a version without a paywall?

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?