Interesting logic about Open Source
It would be great to understand how many people were in that department and for how long they spent "about a person-day per week" asking "How do I...".
I bet that didn't happen when they moved from MS Office 97 to 2010/2013 and had to convert lots of documents as there are incompatible formats also within MS families of products.
So instead of praising and supporting a department that understood Open Source can bring benefits to the organisation the recommendation has been to go back paying the equivalent of "about a person-day per week" worth of licenses/support/EA/etc..
Don't know when that happened but considering that the UK Government has chosen ODF as the official file format and that LibreOffice can work with "legacy" formats, like those used by Microsoft, very well then today's best recommendation would be to promote its use across the whole company.