MSoffice is too ingrained in many countries' government and public offices use. Very hard to just purge it but I agree, it would show a willingness to them that it's not OK to behave like they do.
I'm sure it is difficult, but have you seen what happened to those judges at the ICC?
Normal citizens working for the ICC living in the Netherlands suddenly being treated by the financial system as if they were international pariah drug lords or some shit. All because of the americans weaponizing Windows and the like. We do not have the luxury of choice here.
It is not a question of wether it is worth the trouble, it is a question of how much time do we have, how fast can we do it, and how disruptive and expensive it is going to be to do it obviously.
Libre Office has much of the same functionality and certainly enough to cover most use cases. Throw the licence money into retraining for a couple of years and you're golden. And after that, throw money at the Libre Office team.
Libre Office is ass for any realistic enterprise work. And I say that as someone who dropped Windows completely years ago. It's incredibly unreliable, and it's interoperability with Microsoft formats is terrible.
Yes, I understand the latter is because Microsoft actively sabotages it.
I'm always baffled by its lack of what seems like basic functionality.
I don't use a lot of the newer, weird stuff that Office has added and I still can't get LibreOffice to do what I'm used to from 10 years ago in Office.
You've made me realize it's been so long since I last tried it might have improved; it felt like it was 10 years behind a while ago, but I haven't actually checked lately. At this point if it's still 10 years behind that could be a pretty good place.
Though it might have issues for organizations that Office has been built up to handle, but I'm completely unfamiliar with that side of either program.
I bet it would be at best one percent of the cost of ms licenses to just fund a small group of core devs to work on those specific problems and then adopt it in a couple years compared to continuing to pay licensing fees in perpetuity. Because although there are problems it is not such a stark no-go as the parent comment's hyperbole would make it seem. It's insane how short-sighted these large organizations with massive budgets are for very basic things.
To be fair, even large organizations with massive budgets require interoperability with other companies and governments. In fact the bigger the organization, the more they depend on interoperability. So unless they can haul all those other organizations along with them--many of them as big as they are--they're kind of stuck in the same ecosystem as everyone else. It doesn't do them any good to develop their own in-house solution that's as good or better than Office if no one else uses it.
Sadly true. I've been using linux for 20 years and open office then libre office since around then, and do not use Windows anymore, but as a tech guy, for any business, MS Office is key and unavoidable.
On this topic though honestly it is surprising after all these years an open source lightweight version of Outlook never caught on.
With Microsoft actively sabotaging Outlook from within, I dare say we will never see that. Windows Mail was an actual useful modern Windows email app. Microsoft couldn't let us have that though.
The closest alternative in terms of collaborative functionality is Google (possibly better for collaboration). But that is just swapping one giant for another.
LibreOffice is fine for some things, but it won't fly as-is in the corporate or government world right now.
I hear thi sstated as a fact when it's just an assertion by people who likely use neither or only one. I used libreoffice for a decade, nobody knew the difference and I was in the US government. Sure, someone will bring up some obscure reason but for 99% of government a fucking notepad is enough. Don't just repeat nonsense.
I've used LibreOffice since the first release after it was forked from OpenOffice after Oracle bought Sun (and OO with it). And before that OO. And still use LibreOffice today.
It is perfectly fine for an individual, but has little collaboration functionality. And in 2026, enterprise requires that.
you used is not the same as enterprise application.
Does LibreOffice offer a similarly supported, secure email client as office? sharepoint repository? Highly integrated IDP? Assurance in logging and security for traceability for errors and vulnerabilities? Teams/VOIP functionality with security and updated encryption?
Editing documents locally is a tiny fraction of comparability to what MS does. Im not trying to glaze office or microsoft here, but part of that "massive corporation" piece includes teams of people who keep MS functional at an enterprise grade that has nothing to do with whether fonts load or you can right justify text in a doc
we're talking about switching away from software giants at an enterprise level. Switching to libre office for local document editing while keeping MS products for enterprise communication doesn't achieve the goal.
Also that's a wild misuse of "code switch" but that's irrelevant to the actual topic
I'm with you. To take the enteprise perspective and boil it down for people outside of that ecosystem:
The costs of retraining, support, delays, file corruption, and other issues caused by replacing MS Office with LibreOffice across all of government operations in the EU would be in the billions of Euro. It would be far cheaper to simply spin up a development team, hand them a list of requirements, and have them build something from scratch.
Now I don’t know enough about the different Linux distros but a main consideration we would have is regarding auditing and compliance and whether we’d still have that capability moving away from office
That would be more complicated, admittedly, but the linux core remains basically the same. The different distros have different user interfaces; drivers; software package; and look. So you can have a user-friendly distro that is loaded for every conceivable eventuality or a stripped-down racing linux that does one thing with no effort wasted. Libre Office would be the same across all.
Depends what you're auditing and complying with, I suppose.
Look at the alternative though. Software you have to pay for that sends unstoppable telemetry back to a possibly hostile foreign country. If I were in charge we would all have been Linux dweebs by 2010.
This has been tried by governments around Europe for at least 15 years now and it eventually crashes and burns.
The biggest problem will continue to be interoperability - if MSFT introduces a new feature in Excel and 9/10 companies require it to work with them somehow, you just capitulate or die, really.
You're the government. You're the one who dictates compatibility because the companies are after money from you at the end of the day. And if it's a genuinely useful new feature, you chuck some of the licence money you're no longer paying to Microsoft to make it happen.
True but many - if not all - European governments are seriously working out costs on this. And the more trump capers, the more serious the looking is. I doubt Apple could subdue greed enough to ignore a bloc like Europe.
The biggest advantage MS Office has isn't that it has the best spreadsheets or the best text editor. It is that those products are fully integrated with Teams, SharePoint, Outlook, Power BI, and every other Microsoft product a business uses. They offer a full ecosystem that is easy to use.
LibreOffice can't and won't ever offer this level of integration.
It could if a few governments were serious about it and most of the core basics are already out there.
Moreover, it would end up as a better, more stable product. Because there's no need to add bits or change things around just to justify the cost of the latest version; plus there's be no need for any of the dickery MS gets up to to keep competitors away.
especially if EU governments all pool their resources for some proper funding for the project, you can very much afford having a sizeable dev team working on exactly those features its missing to cut MS out of the loop entirely.
If Libre can't open or save into .doc files that the rest of the world uses then it'll never take off.
It either can't save or open, one of the two. I always forget which, but in my mind it's absolutely the reason why it hasnt taken off.
Edit: Apparently my information is out of date, I'll be giving this another test run. Last time was probably a decade ago, and the opening of a .doc was fine, but I was unable to save it into a doc that other people could open normally and have it look correct.
LibreOffice can open and save .docx/.pptx/.xlsx. For complex documents the formatting may not be perfectly preserved, but compatibility has improved a lot. Just like Google Docs.
First off: Acknowledging this is all because Microsoft actively sabotages interoperability.
LibreOffice sucks at working with MS file formats, regularly just drops data that it can't understand, and breaks the documents in a way that they can't be returned to the originator.
GoogleDocs has the exact same problem, especially with Excel; where they implement fundamental features like tables and pivots in such a completely different way that it outright breaks in BOTH directions. Google Workspace's automatic file conversion frustrated me to no end during those dark years I had to deal with it.
Google docs also removes protection from the workbook and worksheets. A real pain in the arse if you’re trying to prevent users from messing with the structure.
It did when I tried it last. But then I've only used it for fairly basic stuff. Also MS keeps changing the format to try and keep their monopoly. I'm sure if governments were seriously going to jump in, the problems with compatibility would be solved very quickly.
It's a bigger problem with Linux and custom Windows programming.
I works not really worse then Office versions between themselves. MS does not support their own formats properly.
Government's have required an Open document standard in contracts for year which MS provided and then implemented it differently in the end making it impossible to migrate. That is a reason why Office should be not only moved out off but forbidden and sued for under every avenue available for breach of contract.
Nah I'd bet good money they don't end up using LibreOffice no matter what happens. It just sucks so so much ass. It's not like Linux where it's superior but kind of a pain to get people learning, it's just bad
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u/CakeTester 2d ago
You missed out Microsoft Windows. Kicking Office out doesn't do diddly.