[Libreoffice-ux-advise] Another cry for unified behaviour in all documents

[Daniel Mania]

Hello everybody!

As far as I understood, I am not the only one here who would like all 
document types to behave the same. It is just too much work for anyone 
to do anything about it. Well, I have to prepare a talk right now and 
working with Impress is ... not easy. And again the main problem (in my 
opinion) is that Impress documents behave completely different from 
Writer documents, even though both work with the concept of styles. In 
general I would describe Impress' behaviour as "restricting as a 
straightjacket".
In Writer one has to edit a style to apply changes to all text that is 
formatted in that style. In Impress one can change formatting of some 
text and this will change the connected style automatically. It took 
some time to figure that out and understand why the formatting dialog in 
Impress is missing an "Apply" button. This is only one example of many 
but I would like to bring up the restriction to predefined styles in 
Impress as well. Why is the user restricted to 14 styles in 4 categories 
and not given the opportunity to create new styles as in Writer or Calc 
documents?
I think it is these kind of inconsistencies that scare away new users 
and I still remember that, when I started using OpenOffice (RIP), I was 
very frustrated and felt incredibly stupid because I was not able to 
accomplish even the simplest of tasks. In the case of Impress I went so 
far as to create talks in Writer and export them to PDF for presentation!

Is it not worth it starting to do something about this? I feel bad 
suggesting this since I do not know how to program and cannot help much, 
but I feel that LibreOffice would gain a lot from a "unified document 
bahaviour", maybe even more than from new and fancy features!


Greetings,
DM



PS: Is there a way to customize LibreOffice by editing configuration 
files (ini or xml)? I could help doing at least that and maybe some 
other simple tasks.