In the context of a long-term "struggle" with Microsoft and its OOXML format, The Document Foundation (TDF), the foundation behind the open source office suite LibreOffice, recently pointed the finger at the European Commission (European Commission), accusing it of "structural favoritism" in the process of soliciting opinions on the cybersecurity legislation supporting documents. It verbally emphasizes open standards, but in practice forces the public to use Microsoft Excel's proprietary format to submit comments.
This dispute stems from the consultation process for guidance documents related to the EU’s Cyber Resilience Act (CRA), namely EU Regulation (EU) 2024/2847. The CRA is a wide-ranging regulation that covers almost all digital products on the EU market - from routers and IoT devices to operating systems, word processing software and mobile applications - one of its core goals is to promote the adoption of open standards, reduce vendor lock-in and eliminate what the legal text calls "unfettered technology dependence".
But in TDF’s view, the European Commission itself, which is responsible for drafting and implementing these rules, has failed to “lead by example”. Over the years, EU institutions have continuously emphasized the importance of open source software and "digital sovereignty" in their external publicity. However, when ordinary citizens, businesses or organizations want to provide feedback on the CRA guidance document, they are directed to download and fill out a spreadsheet template that is only available in Microsoft Excel .
TDF pointed out in an open letter to the European Commission that this approach is not only contrary to the spirit of regulations to encourage open standards, but also directly brings compatibility risks to users such as LibreOffice who use the OpenDocument format. The letter cites the CRA guidance solicitation page released by the European Commission on March 3, 2026 as an example, emphasizing that the page only provides .xlsx templates, forcing the public who want to participate in the legislative process to "passively accept" Microsoft's proprietary ecosystem.
In the letter, the foundation called on the European Commission to "lead by example" on interoperability issues, abide by the principles it advocated in the CRA, and at least provide .
TDF clarifies that similar feedback templates should be available in at least two formats: an open format (the ODF spreadsheet .ods is preferred because it is an international standard standardized by ISO and without proprietary ownership), and a widely used proprietary format to meet the dependence of some environments on Microsoft Office. At the same time, TDF believes that ideally, plain text or web-based forms should be provided so that respondents who are unwilling or unable to use spreadsheet software can smoothly participate in feedback, thereby completely eliminating dependence on a single software ecosystem.
This public pressure is also another high-profile action taken by TDF this year to address the "Microsoft format dependency issue." Previously, the foundation has issued a series of articles criticizing office suites such as OnlyOffice, accusing them of vigorously marketing compatibility with Microsoft formats through "fake open source" methods, and defaulting to .
In addition, TDF has also publicly refuted the view of some users that "Microsoft Office interface is better than LibreOffice", saying that this preference for the Ribbon interface layout is more of a "psychological normalization effect" caused by Microsoft's long-term market dominance, and insists that LibreOffice's interface design is not inferior to Microsoft Office in terms of efficiency and usability.
In this wave of EU digital legislation represented by CRA, TDF took the opportunity to push the keywords "open standards", "digital sovereignty" and "anti-vendor lock-in" back to the forefront. By naming the European Commission's use of Excel and ignoring ODF, the foundation is trying to force the regulatory agency to align with legislative principles in procedural details, and also hopes to gain broader institutional support and political endorsement for LibreOffice and ODF.