In the faint hope that I would pickup some unknown productivity tip I found myself reading “Writing documents with OpenOffice.org Writer” by Marco Marongiu. Marco did a good job of producing a basic tutorial, but the way he introduced the use of styles made me want to rant about an old pet peeve of mine…
Writing content first and then styling is missing half the point of the styles. The styles not only facilitate formatting : they also give the document a hierarchical outline. Writing using a text processing tool that support an outline mode make me much more productive as I can use the word processor not only as a writing tool but as a tool that supports my thinking. Microsoft Word has it but Openoffice Writer does not. Contrary to what the Openoffice FAQ claims, the Navigator does not provide even a fraction of the functionality of MS Word’s outline mode.
A year ago, Jim Sabatke said about OO Writer : “For example, it can’t collapse multiple sections at a time so you can view/edit several other sections. For some reason, open source word processor teams are resisting this functionality that is an important “thinking” and “organizing” feature that many have come to depend on in almost every MS Windows Word processor”. Make sure you take a look at Outliners.com : wou will understand where the many people like me come from ! As Robert P. J Day said about the outline mode : “MS Word is *exactly* what you want to emulate here. There is no need to do things “differently” or “better” from Word WRT outlining – they got it right”. I wholeheartedly agree and I am very surprised to see that in the Openoffice issue tracker outline mode is a low priority issue that has been open since 2002 – that is more than four years !
Considering how important it is to many people I know (who are quite representative of the technical writing community) and how much it has been discussed for years all over the Net I really don’t understand why outline mode has not been given more attention within the Openoffice project. If I was in a bad mood I would say that this project has a bad case of NIH… But I am not the sort of person who would carry libelous rumors such as this one…
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I’ve tried with the openoffice crowd. Apart from finding it difficult to get my comments heard and getting chastised for not placing my comments and replies in the right places (is not easy for someone not familiar with the development process to just drop in to give some well meaning comments).
However, I’ve been pushing for MSWORD type outlining again and again and again, and the constant reply I get is that the Navigator does that. The navigator DOES NOT DO THAT!!!! It is almost like the developers have never used outline mode, which I find really incredible. I’m a professional software developer with 25 years experience, and Outline mode is pretty much ESSENTIAL to the generation of specifications, design specs, technical analysis documents, paper development, business plans, marketing plans, etc, etc…..pretty much ALL RELEVANT documents in a normal company. So, bottom line, OpenOffice, which I otherwise would consider a good product, fails miserably because it doesn’t have this feature in Writer. If this feature were added to writer,I would really fear for Microsoft, which is why I think that the OOffice team has Microsoft Plants in there. Why else would they ignore THE MOST IMPORTANT FEATURE IN THEIR ENTIRE PRODUCT. I CANNOT switch to openoffice until Outline works like MSWord….sorry. Thus, I see no point in switching with any of the other packages. It is as simple as that. You add the outlining, and I’ll switch ALL packages to use OOFfice.
I’m in the process of trying to put together a set of tools for starting a company right now. I’d LOVE to not have to use MS OFFICE, but I cannot because Outline mode is NOT SUPPORTED in OpenOffice. No, it is not supported and the crappy navigator does not do what MSWord can do.
MS wins until this is done. Simple as that.
Thank you for this post as it reflects something I’ve been trying to get across to the OOffice crowd for some time. They don’t seem to get it. THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT FEATURE, and will decide the success or failure of open office.
-Donald
What’s even more amazing is that on the feature request list, outline mode has the second-most number of votes. So not only are the programmers ignoring a major MSW feature, they’re ignoring their own users too.
This blog article has been posted in the forum discussion section on this issue. Thought you’d like to know.
Final comment: it looks like someone has been assigned this issue and hopefully we’ll see something in the next version!
So far I have had nothing but positive feedback. I did not think that this small article would generate significant reactions. It is good to see that I am not the only one giving thought to this issue. Let’s all continue spreading the outlining gospel !
There is now a followup to this article showing that not only did the OO team listen, but that their ambitions have also gone beyond the requests for an outline mode !
I agree wholeheartedly. I could move my whole organisation to linux and openoffice if it wasn’t for the terrible support for outlining in writer! ridiculous but true.
The only 3 reasons I don’t move completely to OpenOffice are:
1. Outline mode in Writer
2. Text to columns in Calc
3. Slow ODBC response in Base
For me these are 3 show stoppers to an otherwise great package
I agree with all of the comments above that Outlining is the remaining ‘killer’ functionality missing from OpenOffice. I would like to suggest that this functionality be combined with a Mindmapping (see Wikipedia article, there are several good GPL projects) functionality as it is better for large conceptual projects for brainstorming and graphically structuring the thinking process. Mindmapping directly replicates the way the brain generates and connects ideas. The structures from mindmapping could be transfered to Outlining mode for further refinement or directly into an OpenOffice odt.
While I was the original replier to this email, and am still a proponent of getting MSWORD outlining mode into OpenOffice, I’m now starting to believe in the DocBook approach to documentation where the content is seperated from the presentation. The current project and company where I’m working (must remain nameless) is doing this. THe main tool in use is XMLMind (standard edition is free). it is very good for outline mode (until you go beyond level 4….I think the css or xslt code is messed up beyond level 4). However, I am now a faithful believer in seperation of content from presentation. To illustrate why this is so please check out this site and explore it a bit: http://www.csszengarden.com/
What I’d LOVE LOVE LOVE to see Openoffice do is take 2 steps ahead of the rest of the world and 1. Have outline mode (not having that is archaic) 2. Have a special saving mode that will save in DocBook mode with appropriate XSLT and have an export mode that will export to either “Html and .CSS” OR “.pdf” (for printing).
The latter they already have….the others they do not….
This is the path of documentation. Nobody is leading at the moment and this is an opportunity for OpenOffice to jump ahead by providing a word processor that is more than just an XML editor.
Good Luck and may you guys see the light.
Maybe the OO developers are afraid Microsoft will sue them for patent infringement if they add a usable outline mode to the suite…
A possible explanation for why this isn’t being tackled is here:
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Writer_Views
It turns out that some very fundamental ways that Writer works will have to be changed to provide this functionality, so it requires a major overhaul. I’m not saying it’s not worth the effort, but it’s a problem that requires a much bigger solution than it would first appear.
I agree with you about outline mode in MS Word. It is nothing short of useless. I use Ecco Pro and have thousands of notes well organized in it. I have also used NotePad and Omni Outliner which are both excellent (but Mac OSX only).
I hope that Open Office Dudes can get such features into the mix when (if) they do major re-writes.
In the meantime, I am Ecco’ing away quite happily ;)
I really like using Open Office. Though I am highly disappointed as I was getting ready to write something that outlining mode would be wonder for helping me with, and then I find that OO does not support outlining. I certainly would appreciate it if the OO team would include this capability real soon.
In the meantime, I guess I need to look for other tools to fill this gap…
I aggree with the comments posted here. Outline mode is CRITCAL and OO DOESN’T do it. I recently switched to MAC, I really wanted to use OO, but without outline mode it is no use to me. I ended up buying an outliner for the MAC and it still isn’t as convenient as the outliner in Word (and I am not normally a Microsoft fan). Major overhaul required or not, it is time for this functionality. Enough already, get it done. Zero chance I will use OO until it is.
I haven’t used Word’s outline mode, but I think I both agree and disagree here.
I use OO.o to produce some of the most complex hierarchially-organized documents you can deal with — legal pleadings. OO.o’s style features can be a little primitive in this regard, though still more predictable than Word in my experience (specifically: even despite the limited UI, it’s hard to make OO.o ‘lose its mind’ when manipulating or nesting lists, and nearly impossible to create a document that cannot be ‘repaired’).
OO.o uses styles specifically for presentation, and sections (a separate concept) for almost nothing (actually, sections seem to exist mainly because they’re the only way to insert certain types of break).
Word, meanwhile, uses style-and-formatting type features for both presentation and conceptual organization.
Anyone else find both approaches logically broken?
What would be appropriate would be to have both a logical hierarchy (to create a “conceptual view”, including interactive outlining) and a print hierarchy that can either hang on, or be “painted on” independent of/overriding, the logical hierarchy.
Of course, it would also be helpful to have UI to migrate back and forth between the two classes — “turn everything italic into headings”; “print every heading italic.” (The opportunities for this with lists and printed “outlines,” particularly where you need many independent lists with identical formatting, are many and much-needed.)
I believe no one will counter your point that Microsoft Word is much better than Openoffice at corrupting documents in creative ways.
What is liked about the Outline Mode is the outliner user interface. I don’t believe that most users see a problem with mixing style and substance – that is what WYSIWYG did to them…
I’m not against mixing structure and style either – as long as structure comes first. To me, the Microsoft Word approach is fine, but I’m ready to convert to another way of thinking if someone can convince me that it is better.
The discussion of the architectural limitations of Writer was most enlightening. It seems that presentation and content are bound up in documents in an architecturally unhealthy way. However, let me point out that the only persistent aspect of outlining is the assignment of styles to paragraphs. As such if there is some kind of format idea of what a document’s presentation should be, that is somewhat orthogonal to manipulating a document as an outline. If it is difficult to achieve an outliner layout, perhaps an outline presentation should not be a layout. You can imagine, for example, and Applescript program which inserts and reorders paragraphs in some word processor. The word processor has no “idea” that the document is an outline, it just inserts paragraphs, reorders them, and assigns styles to them in response to a series of commands. A user could do the same thing using the world processor’s primitives, except that he’s got a lot of user interface fiddling to contend with.
The effect of outlining, of course, is easy to achieve in OO, or indeed a simple RTF editor with no concept of named styles at all. It’s support for the process of outlining that is wanting. That process is all about interleaving composition and reorganization. You write a bit under one heading, and suddenly you realize that bit has grown to the point where it needs its own heading.
The effect is probably the least important part of the outlining process. If you are writing a speech, you might use outlining to make sure the speech is complete and well organized. But when you give the speech, there is no verbal indentation or headings, people only hear a well organized speech. The same goes for many documents, any document which has a logical structure that transcends its outline numbering. If you write a chapter of a novel, the chapter is one block of text, but it may also be boiled down into a list of four or five things that have to occur in it.
I have just downloaded OO to resume some novel writing project I abandoned years ago. (OSX)
The first thing I did was trawl the UI (nice appearance, btw) for the outlining mode view changer.
Couldn’t find it, so Googled a bit and soon found myself here.
I have to concur with the thread starter. A word processor that is missing a collapsible, re-orderable outlining mode is simply useless. I am astonished that this function is missing.
I’d love to use OO. It looks great and would seem to do everything else that I need, but it looks like I’ll have to go back to Word 4 again.
I own MSO in a fairly current version and hate it with a vengeance for being the most ridiculous piece of bloatware ever devised.
The 20 yr old version is a superb word processor whose only failing is incompatibility with modern OS.
Why the new version runs slower on a machine several hundred times faster is a miracle of incompetence indeed. Even the boot time is several times longer.. as it loads all the html editors, drawing packages, photo-retouching satellite navigation, engine-management system and superfluous function-defeating 3d-iconned glossiness through the layers of object-oriented drivel.
Please fix this. I need a proper word processor that processes, er, words instead of trying to be a complete operating system in its own right and provide features which other packages actually handle properly.
Thanks, all.
This is something I tried to convince the OO people of, but they just have not understood how MSWord’s outline is intended to work. They think that the navigator provides enough functionality which it doesn’t. It’s almost as if the coders don’t look back to when others seemed to understand and forget the problem again….I gave up…..
-Donald
I wonder if any additional head would be paid if we all signed a petition about it…
What a pity this is. I’m not sure why they resist doing this project. I spoke with the predecessors of Open Office, Star Office, at Comdex about the possibility of outlining mode, apparently to no avail. That was 1999. Here we are 10 years later, and still nothing.
It looks like Apple got around to adding an outline mode to Pages… http://www.apple.com/iwork/pages/
I advocate open source projects where ever possible, but I just can’t get much personal value out of OO without really good outline support.
Emacs is complex, but it does a good job with outlines.
Word Perfect had an outline mode, but I couldn’t get much use out of it. There were no accelerators for many of the outlining commands. (at least that I could find.)
All in all, I find it amazing that here we are nearly 30 years into the personal computer era and we’re still not quite there when it comes to word processing.
I posted here and on the oo site and eventually it got raised in priority. The problem is that they didn’t understand the problem. They thought that outline mode meant being able to have a mode called outline mode, not what it really meant…..acting and behaving like MSWORD’s outline mode to expand and close outline sections. Finally when they went to work on it, they briefly looked at it and forgot everything they were told and said “Navigator does the same thing….WHICH IT DOESN”T” and they turned off the bug saying “solved”……which it isn’t.
I am now going to reiterate what I said 4 years ago. Open Office will NEVER EVER EVER EVER become a replacement for Microsoft’s products UNTIL IT SUPPORTS OUTLINE MODE like MSWORD does. Since the apps drive the OS, Linux will NEVER EVER EVER have a shot at truely replacing microsoft as the defacto standard client PC alternative OS until OO supports outline mode as MSWORD handles it.
It’s like I’m hearing crickets every time I say this….and yet it’s true.
-Donald
– collapsible/expandable children
– movable families
– move children of one family to the parents of another family
– move children up and down a tree
– make a parent the child of another family
etc. etc.
And make it easy to do all of that… (NO… highlighting and copy/paste is not a subsitute!)
WordPerfect has been doing this for years and years!
Although I have been using Word Processing systems for a great number of years (WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS was the first system I used which I felt really understood what WP was all about, MS Word seemed not to understand, and OO.o does pretty well), I have generally typed only small documents, and have specialised in writing macros and automating WP systems for others.
As such, I have never really used the Outline feature in anger – although I have inspected it by way of familiarisation.
Recently I started work on a document which I thought would benefit from an outliner, and searched Google to find out how to do outlining in OO.o – which lead me straight to this site – where I found the answer – ie use the Navigator.
Using the latest version (OO.o 3.1), I docked the navigator on the RHS of the page, got my outline there and the whole of the document in the left hand pane. Now for me this works perfectly – albeit entirely differently in appearance from MS Word.
I then checked on the list of features that crgrove said he wanted:
* Collapsible/expandable children – the navigation pane gives this, with the full text synchronised in the main pane
* Movable families – double-click in the navigation pane and then click on “move up with subpoints”
and so on.
As a program developer I would normally ask my clients
(1) what do you want and
(2) why do you want it.
I would answer (2) often by saying that the system does what you require but in a different way. Clearly in the case of OO.o it does do things in a different way from MS Office (which is normally a good thing), but in the case of the Outliner it is not clear that it does not do have the features that you want.
Clearly there are things wrong with the Navigator view. But, and this is the real point of me writing here, if I was a developer of OO.o (which I am not) I would say to you that it DOES do everything that you want, but in a different way from MS Office. Hopefully I have misunderstood what you want – but if that is the case then it is likely that the people at OO.o have also misunderstood what you want. Do you merely want a product that looks the same as MS Office, or is there really some feature of Outlining (other than its appearance) which is missing.
Maybe if you could give a really clear answer to that question, then you would get somewhere with the guys at OO.o.
I am a Software Engineer too (27 years, BsEE).
I am perfectly aware of the capabilities of the Navigator, and it DOES NOT DO what MSWORD can do. Please try the following (one of the most used feature of Outlining).
Start a document by placing the outlining there (is usually how I start a document)….I’ll probably add and delete headings later as I write.
Then start filling in the documentation.
Fill a couple of headings. Now you have a section you are working on and your document is very long so it’s hard to jump from one section to another….lets say a diagram under one section that you need to refer to and you are writing some documentation referring to this (very common).
So…what is typically done is to COLLAPSE the text in the other outlining sections and only leave the two sections you are using UNCOLLAPSED. THIS, and this alone, is the feature of outlining that people want. Otherwise it’s just another header system.
Navigator CANNOT collapse outline sections.
In WORD if you select a level one outline and collapse it it will collapse all subheaders too. If you only want to collapse some subheaders, then you just click on that and collapse those one by one leaving the one you are working on open.
There are 2 other uses for outlining….automated numbering by outline, and table of contents generation. I’m sure Navigator has something similar to these (I would hope).
However it’s the collapsing and expanding of outline sections that is the most useful.
OOo cannot do this.
I have put in statements to this effect at OOo, and the developers there do not listen. They just give replies like you do, because they’ve never used MSWORD. I don’t believe that anyone on that project should be allowed unless they have used MSWORD and Frammaker.
Frammaker is a more professional product for books. It requires different files for each chapter…..but I believe it had the ability to collapse subsections too.
Thanks
-D
I was just thinking that if the OOo folks could provide a means to collapse headers and subheaders (maybe through the navigator), that’d be fine. That would accomodate me.
I don’t mind using something different. It’s the functionality that is wanted.
Thx
-D
Absolutely, OO.o does not collapse sections as MS Word does. However moving to sections is easy by double clicking in the navigator to go to the required section.
To view two parts of the document at the same time – eg text on one page and picture on another – simply use Window | New Window – then it is possible to view two copies of the document at the same time – this also works differently from MS Word, which allows you to split the screen – but has the same effect – updates in one window are reflected in the other.
In MS Word I always used Headers for Table of Contents and Numbering – and this seems to work in OO.o as well.
In the end I am only trying to be helpful. I am nothing to OO.o – I barely use the product, and am not registered on their forums. It seems to me that you have a requirement that is not met by OO.o and I am simply trying to get you to phrase your requirement in such a way that the OO.o people will understand it and then implement it.
There are three questions that need to be answered:
(1) What you want to do
(2) Why you want to do it
(3) In what way is OO.o’s current solution deficient
The answer to (1) is clear – you want to be able to collapse sections – which OO.o most certainly does not do.
The answer to (2) is still unclear to me – the outline is always visible and (although not perhaps ideal) it is possible to open two copies of the document at the same time to see two different parts of the document.
As I said before in my previous post – OO.o certainly does not have the same functionality as Word – it does not collapse sections – but it seems to have equivalent functionality. If I was at OO.o, although I can understand what you want, I would not be able to understand why what has been delivered is insufficient. But in the end, it is not me that you need to convince, but the people at OO.o.
I actually did explain it to them in their forum, and issues were created, but then someone said it was the same as a different issue and it got cancelled (when it wasn’t the same).
I posted a new one today as there was an issue where they actually got a solution, but decided not to put the patch in!!!! I asked them the status of this issue and can it be implemented and when. I haven’t gotten a reply yet. The feature was to have a +/- button on the Navigator which not only collapsed the navigator but the text in the document too. It would only be for that session (not saved), which I said was fine. If they implement that patch….that would do it! So we’ll see.
Thx
-D
Actually this feature is implemented in Linux version of OOO. This feature simply doesn’t work for Windows…. Hope there is a simple solution to turn it on in windows OS
AS Stevie Ray said man thats a drag. I am working on a 2 chapter outline. I understand what to write(sort of)… and i ONLY have a good product in OpenOffice but i am trying to understand what i am seeing in the window of the outline. With no Intel on how or what to do with it. So this “Problem” is new to me, i found this site roaming around, i hope they fix it..BUT thanks for the persistent interest as well. lets hope.
Well.. I was quite excited to get the last bulletin from this board. Talk of a +/- button and all but no mention of Mac implementation.
I d/ld the latest version, 3.1.1. No outlining functionality.
I’ve come back here a few times for a look-see, so I thought I’d better add this note about the Mac version STILL being useless.
The functionality is, of course, necessary on all platforms.
Would any of the development team who read this page please give a few minutes to explain the ongoing refusal to address this issue?
It’s not like they’re not putting any work into the project…
Why has this become an “Us and Them” situation when it is, after all, simply a selection of “us” developing something of benefit for the rest of us?
Is the problem simply this:
having initially not acknowledged the requirement for a full outlining feature – possibly because the requirement was misunderstood to be something else – the Writer software was blocked-out inside some sort of paradigm envelope that won’t actually support the addition of a feature which is too fundamental to be an add-on, but would, in fact, have to be a sort of foundation for the entire program structure?
If this is the case, and the whole Writer project would have to be started again from scratch to support the #2 most requested feature, then isn’t all of the work being put into continuing an essentially non-viable product simply a gesture of monumental arrogance? It’s the sort of behaviour one might expect from a government – well, now we’re here in power, we’ll do what we want, not what you want – and then impose our thinking on you instead of representing you.
It’s no use bleating about all the hard work being put in gratis – if it is moving away from what is wanted, it is merely self-serving and not otherwise useful.
So – what’s the inside word?
Is the request being refused simply through willful stubbornness or did the developers get it completely wrong in the first place and are now pretending to continue misunderstanding what outlining is because they haven’t the balls to admit to a fundamental error?
I’d rather it were some other reason, and if this is so, could you please tell us what it is?
If this issue of fully collapsible, hierarchical outlining is NOT going to be addressed, please have the decency to let us know and we can cease courting an attractive but unresponsive prospect, abandon any future interest in the project and go back to looking for alternative solutions rather than constantly taking it out to dinner and getting to know its peculiar little ways with a view to a long-term relationship.
If OO Writer is never going to give us a proper outlining mode I, like many other serious users I have spoken to, would rather stop wasting any more time and expectations on what is, at the end of the day, going to be nothing more than a grandiose and expensive personal hobby for the developers.
I’ve just spent a couple hours trying to get OO 3.1 to do outlines the way I want to do outlines, like I did a long time ago with Ready! and a few years ago with Word. I gave up. Navigator helps, but it is still cumbersome and the extra effort impedes the free flow of ideas that I love about a good outliner. Navigator looks very useful for editing a nearly complete document, but NOT for me to create it easily in the beginning.
I too have had it with the outline functionality of OO 3.2 I just spent 2 hours trying to type up a relatively simple outline (something that would have taken me 30 minutes in MS) and have given it up as an exercise in frustration. It doesn’t have any rhyme or reason how it places topics and subtopics and will randomly change letters and numbers to some other letter or number. For example changnig a subtopic letter to a new roman numeral yet not reindenting (actually this isn’t always true. Sometimes it reidinets sometimes not) I’ve just sent 20 minutes trying to turn OFF this feature so I could manually space everything myself. I haven’t figured out how to do that yet. Thank god I saved it as a .doc so I can just put it in MS and do it right the first time.
I would also love to use OO, but the lack of outliner is a problem for me. Please OO developer guys – look at this thread and give us an outliner facility in OO !!
I am a real fan of the open software and open document philosophy. So I found this article while once again having a look at the web if there is a possibility to use an Outline Editor within OO Writer. Incredible but true there still seems no progress to have happened. As I agree with the other writers here, that an outline mode is a crucial feature for any text processing tool – I would like to leave at least some sort of resort for those seeking for an outline mode: Using http://sourceforge.net/projects/freemind/ enables you to work on a mindmap and export it to Open Office format thus you can do the work in two steps. I know that this is not the perfect solution, but better than nothing and perhaps a constructive hint for developers that might read this.
All the best for the new year Peter
What happened is this. I managed to pursuade them to open a bug that this be fixed. The managers of the site did this. Unfortunately, it got assigned to an idiot, who was not familiar with the problem. He saw the old resolution which was that Navigator solved this, and said…OK, solved!….idiot!!!!
So, I threw up my arms at that and gave up.
Add me to the list of people who can’t switch away from Windows because of NOOOMS (No Open Office Outline Mode Syndrome).
I’m starting to thing MS is bribing developers not to do it.
Alas, considering many people don’t even know the “1920s typewriter” page mode is not the only way to work, it’s a long way to go…
I was especially angry that Abiword that more or less pretented to duplicate MS Word doesn’t include outline mode…. grrrr…
Btw, has anybody tried LibreOffice’s Write? It *seems* to have an outline mode.
If OpenOffice Write is a prime tool for Linux and open source software developers and planners for creating documents for sharing plans and ideas on a more formal basis, then the OO and open source community *owes* it to itself to upgrade Write with fully featured outlining capabilities.
Is there some sort of Microsoft patent conflict looming?
Libreoffice is what I use now anyway….is true open source.
-D
Full ACK that a) Open or Libre Office is preferred over MS and b) Word’s outline mode is crucial for effective and intuitive work on a structured document (and that means: most).
I’ve been working with Outliners before MS included it in Word, and sadly MS seems to have been the only company that understood how the interface makes sense. I just started a new text project and was missing an outline feature in OO, so I landed here.
I installed LibreOffice 3.4 expecting to find an outline option there – where is it? I can’t find any improvement over OO 3.3 (but I’m willing to learn).
I am a sysadmin, who sometimes also writes little scripts and software. So, I always have linux desktop installed (either as dual booting or in a virtualized window). However, given the lack of outliner in OO, I never considered moving completely away from windows desktop. I did try Wine a while ago just so I can run MSOffice in linux, but the experience left so much to be desired, and I got tired of tackling endless bugs and hoping that things would work as expected.
I have just installed LibreOffice 3.3.4 on a laptop I have just converted from windows to linux, with the full confidence that OpenSource alternatives must have outliners built in by now. But lo and behold, the old problem of a lack of an outliner persists. I actually stumbled on this post while searching for help on outlining within this version of LibreOffice. All I get is a Navigator with no intuitive way of using it, and a need to have other little windows open. A totally unproductive way of working.
I CANNOT WRITE WITHOUT AN OUTLINER !!!! .. So, I have to dig up some extra memory and install virtualbox or xen so I can once again install MS Office for producing documents that align with the logic of my thinking, and allow me to be quickly productive.
Surely, after 5 years of having a sensibly critical article like this, one would have thought this matter would have been laid to rest a long while ago. Well, perhaps MS does have plants within these opensource projects .. :-)
I was looking for a way to expand/collapse a section when I found this topic. Wow – so incredibly discouraging that they haven’t implemented a good outlining tool yet.
Especially, I wish I had the ability to expand / collapse a section / heading
I’ve actually been looking for an Improvement over MS Word for years. I never really liked the MS Word Outliner formatting options re wrapping, indenting, etc. but it was the best available ‘standard’ tool.
I finally found InfoCube (http://www.infoqube.biz/) that really does all & more than I need.
It’s only downfall is exporting to something less powerful but commonly used (MS Word, OOfice, Libre Writer).
Thank you Larry, trying it now.
For the subject of this page : outline view. It is just so sad “they” did not listen (dunno who is “they” of course). Would have made of Ooo exactly the tool I needed.
Any reasonably advanced document is extraordinarily enhanced when an author has an easily collapsible and expandable outline view such as that provided by Microsoft Word.
This feature has probably been the most requested feature in OpenOffice / LibreOffice over the many years it has been asked for.
The Navigator feature is no replacement for a in-document collapsible outline feature as in Microsoft Office and other packages.
What is interesting is OpenOffice/LibreOffice Impress, impressively does have a collapsible outline feature, however, it does not hide regular text. Calc has foldable rows, to hide rows.
Using a hidden text expression defined through a complex and laborious process for each specified paragraph or section in Write, is certainly no answer. Point and collapse/expand hierarchies with a click of the mouse is the only way to do it.
Can the code from Impress or Calc be modified to provide collapsible hierarchies in Write in the form of foldable text?
Clearly the OpenOffice / LibreOffice developers are hugely retarded in this most basic understanding of writing complex documents, or the Write team do not have the technical skills to implement it. Perhaps the Impress and Calc teams have the skills?
One certainly can not complain in regard to opensource software, since the programmers have donated their time and effort for the good of all. However, those of us in the opensource field, are often vastly superior to paid programmers. Let’s try keep it that way.
Much thanks to the OpenOffice / LibreOffice teams!!!
C