Denmark Quietly Dropped Its Plan to Quit Microsoft Office, and Collabora Says the Trial Is Only Paused

Denmark's government was supposed to show Europe how to walk away from Microsoft Office. Instead, the pilot meant to prove it could be done has been shut down without a word, and the ministry now says nobody there uses the alternative and nobody plans to.

The open-source vendor at the center of the experiment disagrees. Collabora says the trial is only on hold and will be back before the year is out.

A loud start

The pilot began on June 19, 2025 at what was then Denmark's Ministry of Digital Affairs. Thirty-eight employees in the ministry's department were to work without Word, PowerPoint and Excel, using Collabora, the UK-based office suite built on LibreOffice.

Danish company cBrain, Collabora's integration partner, delivered the system, which also had to work with the ministry's case management software, F2.

Then digital minister Caroline Stage launched it with fanfare, presenting it as a first step toward less dependence on American tech giants. Media in Denmark, across Europe and in the United States picked it up. Denmark was not alone in the ambition, either: France and the Netherlands have also taken steps to replace Windows.

A quiet ending

Computerworld Denmark reported on October 20 that the ministry had dropped the project. It ran for roughly six months and had reportedly ended by the time Denmark called an early election in February 2026. The ministry itself has since been folded into the Ministry for Research, Education and Digitalization.

According to the ministry's statement in the Danish press, its employees do not test Collabora today, and there are no plans for them to do so. The project was closed without a proper evaluation.

The problems reported during the trial were the everyday kind that make office workers miserable: broken formatting and paragraph styles, blank pages and trouble tracking changes. XDA also points to difficulties importing files in Microsoft's proprietary OOXML format.

Who gets to call it a failure

Collabora CEO Michael Meeks rejects the idea that Denmark has given up. "Rumours that Denmark has abandoned seeking alternatives to Microsoft Office do not reflect what we're hearing on the ground," he told XDA.

In his account, the election and the ministry shakeup simply paused the Collabora Online trial run by cBrain, which "is due to start again with a new stakeholder group before the end of the year." He added that "the problems cited by some press recently, were addressed last year."

So the two sides describe the same project in opposite terms. The ministry says no one is using the software and no one will. The vendor says a restart is already scheduled.

Copenhagen Business School professor Mikkel Flyverbom said testing alternatives in a pilot was a good idea, but he wishes the ministry would learn from it and share what it found with the rest of the public sector.

Danish IT commentator Mogens Norgaard was less gentle. In a Computerworld column he called the outcome "deeply surprising," with obvious sarcasm, and described a familiar pattern: public IT initiatives launch with fanfare, then die quietly in a reshuffle or reorganization and leave no trace behind.

That pattern matters well beyond one ministry. Europe is pushing on several fronts against American tech dominance, including a plan to make Apple, Google and Meta pay more. Denmark's pilot was meant to show the softer side of that fight, where a government simply stops using the software. Without an evaluation, nobody outside the ministry can say what it actually learned.

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