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this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2026
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95% of the time they don't. And that's the point.
Well, if Collabora Office was as compatible as MS Office, Denmark would have switched. But it's not and denial won't change anything. I have an old .doc (not .docx) file that my employer needs for a weird edge case and the only way I can open it under Linux is the Office.com web suite.
Again, Collabora is a commercial enterprise. They need to act like it and throw resources at massively improving file format compatibility, no matter how messy MS formats are.
95% of the time Microsoft formats render fine ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. You write "edge case" yourself. And when you're in the field of providing compatibility you'll see that Microsofi is hostile. And they hava a good business case to be that hostile, can' t really blame them from said business perspective.
But the way forward is not playing catch. What institutions need to understand is that there'll never be a drop-in replacement. Especially not, as people have learned the quirks of MS Office. That is why users blame an alternative office suit but when MS Office breaks once again it's just how it is.
If companies, really any institutions want to break free of MS Office they need to really treat it as the complicaten change process it is. That means allocating resources for changing and adapting said edge cases. When you just go to randomly install some flavor of Libre Office for 38 employees, but everything else stays the same...yeah, you gonna fail big time, no surprise there. But you would fail anyway, even if we had perfect compatibility today. Because tomorrow the next MS update will break compatibility and your 38 users are the idiots of the institution again, until the next update drops.
Ask the Danes if that's true. Apparently not so much.
In my case yes. In case of the Danish public sector it's either not an edge case or 5% broken documents are way too much. I'm not a Dane in the public sector to tell which it is but it appears to be one of those two.
Forward not, but it is to deal with countless of existing documents. There is no way around this fact. That's like expecting Steam Decks to be successful by not providing compatibility with existing Windows games. Valve tried already with the first generation of Steam Machines / SteamOS 1.x & 2.x. Didn't work.
Are native Steam Linux Runtime native games a better path forward than relying in Proton? Absolutely. Will there ever be a Linux version of Diablo 4? No.
A community project like LibreOffice can afford not to care much about legacy MS Office documents. A commercial enterprise that expects to get public contracts absolute cannot. And what's so insane about this is that Collabora is actually the main contractor for Valve on SteamOS and yet they don't transfer the business learnings from that to their own office suite.
Have you read the article at all?
This was no "we evaluated, it did not work". It was "we don't like this. Hey, Bob, please tell us how it doesn't work" - "Sure, I had this one document which rendered wrongly" - "see, it doesn't work, now we can scratch the project".
Unlike you I actually did.
there were reports late last year that the officials were running into formatting issues such as blank pages when opening Office documents in Collabora and vice versa.
Vivid imagination. Nothing of that kind is in the article but you seem to have made up your mind.
There were reports. Yeah, like your report of "I have this edge case, where it doesn't work", but you seem to have made up your mind 😅