LibreOffice Vanilla on the Mac App Store provided by Collabora

Credits and more info

LibreOffice Vanilla in the Mac App Store s based directly on the LibreOffice source code from The Document Foundation. Individual users searching for help or documentation, are advised to go to the LibreOffice project.

Users that want or need the missing functionality (see details and explanation below) can of course download the version from The Document Foundation.

Differences between LibreOffice Vanilla and LibreOffice from the LibreOffice website

There are two important differences between LibreOffice Vanilla and LibreOffice as offered by The Document Foundation.

  • The version in the App Store does include multiple language support, which is not directly available from The Document Foundation.
  • The version in the App Store does not include Java. As a result there is:
    • no database reporting engine (jfreereport);
    • no impossibility to interact with any DB engine reliant on JDBC drivers;
    • no beanshell or Javascript support;
    • no Java extension support (e.g. LanguageTool).

Of course, this situation is not ideal, but caused by the Mac App Store policy does not allow external dependencies. Ideally it would be great to offer Java support for users enjoying the convenience of installing from the App Store. However bundling (and maintaining) a full JRE is complicated, and including it would increase the download size significantly.
Don’t forget that there is often positive news too around our software and Apple! Such as the work that we did to support LibreOffice on the new MacOS ARM64 platform. Initially announced in November 2020, the work is well finished and it will be available in the new version of our enterprise supported desktop solution: Collabora Office.