[reacharavindh]

The companies and Government offices in Denmark are heavily entrenched in Microsoft ecosystem as I remember from a few years ago. The amount of money they would be spending in license costs!

It is 2025, couldn’t we get away with using cheaper/even free(and or open source) online versions of office software?

I don’t even have MS Office installed on my personal computer. When I need to deal with .docs or .xlsx files, I either use Google docs or Libre Office if it is too complicated for Google Docs.

[Wololooo]

Check https://www.onlyoffice.com/ honestly it's pretty good, open source, multiplatform and it opens everything I've thrown at it so far.

I like libre in general but one too many times it just didn't play ball with some random docx documents.

[okanat]

It is not as open. Try building the desktop editors yourself. Some parts of the build system are not documented / not included in the repo.

Moreover it is a rebranding of Russian P7 Office. The company didn't cut ties with Russia and they still sell to the military. The owner created multiple shell companies in Latvia and Singapore to obscure this. I don't think this is something that EU governments trust, unless a deep inspection of the entire source is done and the repo is forked under an EU entity.

https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/serious-claims-made-agai...

[Wololooo]

Awwww fuck, thanks for the heads up.

[freehorse]

I don't have ms office installed in my work macbook (it was not pre-installed, they just told me I should install it but I never did). Only once I actually needed access to a computer with ms office installed, because of some horrible word template that should not have existed in the first place. Most of the time microsoft's online suite works just fine, if I cannot do it in pages/numbers. The times I had to use teams (my group hates it and doesn't use it, so only when have to talk with outsiders) running it from the browser worked too.

My colleagues have more problems than me anyway with reading those csv files in excel in a locale that uses "," for decimals. A side effect of avoiding excel is that it is much easier to read csv files for me.

I understand others may make heavier use of more word-excel specific stuff and have more issues, but I never had actual issues with avoiding to install ms office at work, even though everybody here uses it all the time and I have to work together on documents with them.

[b112]

It is 2025, couldn’t we get away with using cheaper/even free(and or open source) online versions of office software?

Online?! There should be no usage of anything online to store or work with government data.

[bryanrasmussen]

as I said previously there will be an inflection point and then MS is basically history in the whole country, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44238752 that's the way Denmark works

which I am personally looking forward to, not because I think MS is so much worse than Linux, Mac etc. (although haven't really used for some years so I may be wrong) I personally think of OS's as being commodified, and I do like the ability that MS gives you to do globaly hotkeys and hotstrings that you really can't replicate easily, if at all, in other OS's (which security wise is probably a plus, if you can catch keystrokes easily enough you can make keyloggers), nope I have a personal beef here.

Some years ago I was working for the Danish Governmental department of IT and Telephony, later changed to Digitization Department (a department or "styrelse" being a big government agency subsidiary to a ministry) running a project to provide overarching data standardization for the government - mainly providing and hosting XML schemas for data interchange, providing some services etc.

The data interchange repository we were on was provided by Microsoft, which was built on top of some MS product the name of which I can't recall that they were thinking was good for this kind of thing, a glorified file server with some lousy search etc. It was extremely sub-par, so we had a meeting with some MS guys, Jean Paoli etc. where basically they got mad at us for their sub par product and said they couldn't be associated with it, this came about a month after Bill Gates had a meeting the prime minister and talked shit about how Denmark needed MS but MS didn't need Denmark.

So anyway, personally, my spiteful little heart will sing when Denmark no longer "needs" MS.