Why Governments Are Dumping Microsoft Office — and What Your Office Should Know First

In March 2026, Germany's Federal Ministry for Digital and State Modernisation did something quiet and enormous: it folded the Open Document Format — the file format behind LibreOffice — into the Deutschland-Stack, the technical framework that now governs digital infrastructure across every level of German public administration. Microsoft's own format didn't make the list. "This is not a recommendation or a preference, it is a mandate."

Germany isn't an outlier. Italy's Ministry of Defence has migrated over 100,000 workstations to LibreOffice. The French Gendarmerie nationale has spent two decades moving the bulk of its estate to open source. The Austrian military just finished moving 16,000 machines off Microsoft Office. Munich ran city hall on Linux and LibreOffice for years. None of these are proofs-of-concept — they're operational deployments in organizations where a locked-out document system is a national security problem.

If ministries with tens of thousands of employees can make the jump, the question for a small business isn't can it be done. It's whether it's worth doing for you — and what it costs to find out. Let's talk about both sides honestly, because the sales pages won't.

What LibreOffice actually is

LibreOffice is a free, open-source office suite: a word processor, a spreadsheet, a presentation tool, a drawing app, a small database front-end, and a formula editor. It's maintained by The Document Foundation, a nonprofit whose statutes exist specifically so no single company can ever own or restrict the code. It runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux, it opens your existing Word and Excel files, and it has been in continuous development since 2010. The current release is 26.8, and it's installed on hundreds of millions of machines worldwide.

The money math first, since that's what everyone asks: Microsoft 365 Business Standard runs $23.50 per user per month (with Copilot bundled) or $12.50 without, paid yearly. Business Premium is $32. Business Basic — which does not include desktop Office at all — is $7. LibreOffice is $0, forever, on as many machines as you want, with no per-seat counting and no annual renewal decision. For a 15-person shop, the desktop-suite difference alone is roughly $2,250–$4,500 a year — every year, compounding.

But the license fee was never the real lock. The lock is the file format, and that's why governments moved.

Why governments are actually doing it

When a ministry's records live in a format one vendor effectively controls, that vendor controls the ministry's own history. Raise the subscription price, and the choice is pay or lose access to twenty years of archives. Change the product's behavior under you mid-contract, and the adjustment is yours to fund. The Document Foundation calls this "no single vendor can pull the plug" — the boring, unglamorous core reason: governments are buying the ability to be left alone.

Small businesses live under the same lever with less leverage to fight it. Your invoices, contracts, and payroll records are in a format someone else owns. Every price increase is a renewal you can't really refuse, because the alternative is your own documents becoming slow to open correctly.

LibreOffice reads and writes the open ODF standard (ISO/IEC 26300) as its native format — and it reads and writes Microsoft's formats too. OpenDocument is the rare format where any conforming application, from any vendor, on any operating system, can open your files ten years from now. That's not ideology. That's insurance.

The benefits, in plain terms

• Cost: $0 in licenses, no per-seat audits, no renewal cliff. The savings above are real and permanent.
• Format freedom: your documents stop being hostage to one company's pricing department. ODF is an international standard with multiple independent implementations.
• Privacy and sovereignty: the software runs locally on your machines. Nothing phones home. No document telemetry, no "connected experiences," no AI assistant analyzing your contracts unless you ask one to.
• No forced upgrade treadmill: Windows 10 end-of-support stranded thousands of perfectly good PCs this year. LibreOffice runs fine on old hardware and old operating systems — the five-year-old laptops stop being e-waste.
• Offline by design: the Austrian military's decision traced to a single question: can we run office software with zero cloud connection at all? With LibreOffice the answer is yes, permanently.

The issues — the part most articles skip

Here's the honest ledger. None of these are dealbreakers, but all of them are real, and a migration that ignores them fails.

• File fidelity is good, not perfect. A heavily-formatted Word document — tracked changes, comment threads, custom styles, embedded objects — can shift slightly when round-tripped through LibreOffice. Complex spreadsheets with exotic macros can misbehave. For everyday documents, most people notice nothing. For legal drafts and finance models, you test before you commit.
• Macros and automation break hardest. If your business runs on Excel macros or Access databases, that's the real migration cost — those are built on Microsoft's scripting layer. Some translate, some don't, all of it needs testing. This is the single most common failure point in real migrations.
• The interface is different. Not worse — different. Ribbon users take a day or two to retrain their muscle memory. Training cost is real but small; governments did it at 100,000-seat scale.
• Collaboration is the genuine gap. Microsoft 365's real product is co-editing: ten people in one spreadsheet simultaneously. LibreOffice is a local-first desktop suite — if your team lives in real-time co-editing, this is the feature that will hurt. The workaround (Nextcloud with Collabora, an online LibreOffice) exists, but now you're running another server.
• Nobody's job is "LibreOffice admin." In a Microsoft world, problems have a vendor and a support line. In an open-source world, the support is your IT person, the community, or a paid service. That's a trade of money for responsibility — sometimes a great one, but make it deliberately.
• Counterparty reality: you will still receive .docx files from clients, banks, and lawyers forever. LibreOffice handles them, but the occasional formatting quirk lands on your desk, not theirs.

The five-minute readiness check

Before touching a single workstation, answer these five questions. They'll tell you whether your office is an easy candidate or a hard one:

1. Open your three most complex documents in LibreOffice on one machine. Do they look right? Print correctly?
2. Does anything in your business depend on Excel macros? (VBA buttons, automated workbooks?) Count them. That's your migration cost, roughly.
3. How often do two people edit the same document at the same time? Daily = hard mode. Weekly or less = manageable.
4. Who fixes it when something looks weird? Is that person okay owning a free tool with community support?
5. Is any client contract or compliance regime dictating a specific product? (Some regulated contracts do. Check before switching, not after.)

If those answers come back clean, a pilot is cheap: install it on one machine, run it alongside Office for two weeks, and let reality vote. LibreOffice installs in minutes and uninstalls the same way — the pilot costs nothing but attention.

Where this lands for a small business

The government migrations matter to you for one reason: they prove the hard version of this problem is solvable at absurd scale. If the Italian Ministry of Defence can move 100,000 workstations, the question was never capability. The question is whether your stack — your macros, your co-editing habits, your contracts — is shaped like an easy case or a hard one.

Most small offices are closer to easy than they expect. Documents created this year, mostly shared as attachments, mostly edited by one person at a time. The heavy co-editing lives in spreadsheets, and that's exactly where testing matters most.

And if you run the five questions and come back with "we have eleven business-critical macros, four people co-editing all day, and a contract that names Microsoft Office" — that's a useful answer too. Now you know what the lock is actually made of, and you're deciding with your eyes open instead of at renewal time when the invoice says it for you.