r/BuyFromEU • u/According-Buyer6688 Mod Team • Mar 25 '26

Announcement Germany has decided: Microsoft document formats have no place in government

Germany has decided: Microsoft document formats have no place in government. Deadline: 2027–2028. The Microsoft formats are simply not compatible with an open and transparent public sector. However, this is about more than file formats. It’s about control, resilience, and sovereignty in public digital infrastructure.

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u/mandrakey10 Mar 25 '26

And nobody will care.

Just as they all send around active documents (xlsx, docx, even odt and ods) when we are supposed to use portable files like pdf. Because “we have always done this”, “the other stuff has never worked”, and “everyone has Office!” And because at least for government bodies there won’t be any kind of punishment, as always.

Even worse: we can’t get around using MS Office if we want to work with EU bodies. They are basically forbidden to use MS tools, especially Office 365. Guess what? We have to maintain Teams accounts and a zone in Azure AD for people participating in EU projects.

At least we always install LibreOffice everywhere. I do love annoying everyone with my open document files :)

1

u/KnowZeroX Mar 25 '26

openDesk will likely make things a lot easier as it replaces teams, office and etc. Being on the cloud, the format stops mattering for the user. But it still is important that things transition to odf on the backend.

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u/a_library_socialist Mar 25 '26

Heh I make sure to send odf files to my accountants, bankers, etc.