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Thank you; your explanation makes sense.
I can't say I agree with Virgil. You can't help working with styles.
Whenever you create a document, the default set of styles is automatically
applied. When you create a numbered or bulleted list, you are applying the
associated styles automatically. The other styles (e.g., heading styles)
are there for you to use if you need them, no matter how short or one-off
your document is. Learning to use the style system pays off handsomely,
even if you only need the defaults.
John
John,
I fully agree with you. Just learning how styles control so much in Writer is very helpful. But, I have spent literally hours setting up and modifying styles. While it has been a labor of love for me, it has been a labor and a major investment in time, time I might not have if all I'm trying to do is type a three paragraph letter. And, there have been those times when the styles just seem to want to fight against me. While I find such battles fun, they do often distract from the task at hand.
Virgil
Hi 
+1
I think there is a balance somewhere. I found that about 20mins of reading
the "Published Guides" chapter on styles and spending about 10mins messing
with settings saved me about an hour or more on a task that had previously
taken at least an hour. I can't remember the exact times but it was
something like that. It's probably in the archives from maybe 2-3 years
ago but it's not worth looking up better estimates.
Of course i was panicking at the time so i wasn't in the best frame of mind
for really taking it all in but even a small investment of time helped save
me quite a bit of time that one time and has continued to save me tons of
time ever since. I do often go with the defaults but keep meaning to
set-up a set of styles to make all my different letters a bit more
consistent with each other across different systems.
I think you can get some useful time-saving stuff without having to spend
hours setting it up. That hopefully gives you more time to improve on your
styles to make more time-savings and/or to make your documents look
better.
Regards from
Tom
_Back on topic_
Either you insert (type/paste/import) character content (including tab
stops) into pre-formatted paragraphs or you insert character content and
apply your own paragraph styles aftwerwards (including tab stop
positions for the right presentation). Content and presentation are two
separated things.
_Off topic_
For 99% of all *my* formatting and grouping the built-in styles are just
fine. Whether I start with my own Writer template or compile something
from scratch is not that important. In both cases I use styles that are
already there and if I modify any styles this is a much easier process
than doing all the formatting within the document. In rare cases the
outcome is a new template for a new type of document with modified
styles and few user-defined ones.
But I am not particularly picky with all this.
The moment you think "this doesn't look right to me" is the moment that styles pays off.
Our unique visual look at the world is just what styles is all about.
When someone receives your document, there will be little questions that it is yours.
Not something you don't already know, but very important to the world around you.
So, it begs the question, when you are using Writer, should there be a menu item that asks "Change this style permanently?" so the your world grows instead of trying to predetermine everything?
MS Word has a setting in its Styles dialog that allows one to save a modified style to the template upon which the loaded document is based. I've always thought a similar shortcut in Writer would be nice.
It would also be nice to assign a shortcut key to a style from within the Styles dialogs rather than through the more cumbersome Tools/Customize dialogs. (Interestingly, the contextual Help screen for the Styles "Organizer" tab states there is an "Assign Shortcut Key" option, but I've never seen it.)
Virgil
About ten years ago, I developed a very fascinating, but unhealthy, obsession with typography, so I became *very* picky with all this. I therefore created my own styles. Over the years, however, I've found that other parts of Writer make use of the standard built-in styles. For example, the Table of Contents feature defaults to the standard Heading styles (although it can use any other style). The eLaix e-book extension does the same. So, there is definitely a benefit to staying with the default styles.
So, now, my plan is to go back to the default template along with its default styles and see how well I can live with them as they are, modifying them only as necessary. My guess is that there's a lot of good stuff already in the program.
Virgil
Correction: "Change this style permanently?" should be "Change your personal style permanently?".
That way the user does not assume that they are changing the default setting, but unique to them.
Hi
It's be nice if certain users could set the style for all users on that
machine. So 2 option rather than just the one, maybe.
Regards from
Tom
Sounds good to me!
Hi
Anyone fancy posting a 'bug-report' about this and marking it as a "feature
request"?
I've still not registered on the bug-report site and i'm a bit swamped with
other things and i'm a bit nervous about the whole process, despite my
reassurances to JerryVB, as i'm not usually much of a "people person"
especially when it comes to suggesting possible improvements!
Regards from
Tom
Couldn't be simpler. Simply create a personal template containing your
personal default styles and save a new default template for styles you want
all users on that machine to use. See
https://help.libreoffice.org/Writer/Changing_the_Default_Template to see
how to do it.
John