The only way this hierarchical system works is if each heading is immediately identifiable.

For example, a Heading 2 paragraph indicates information that is subordinate to a Heading 1 paragraph, so that a Heading 1 section entitled “Choosing Fonts” might have Heading 2 sections called “Finding Fonts” and “Identifying Types of Fonts.” Headings are supposed to both help readers scan and identify the structure of the information. Writer is equipped with ten predefined paragraph styles for headings, not including titles and subtitles. Fortunately, few are essential, and those that are can be replaced by more reliable features. Although some have occasional uses, most of the time applying them means being laughed at for your incompetence. Certainly, in the decade that Sun Microsystems oversaw the code, very little was done to update it with the result that much of the code has a nineties-like look to it.īut regardless of when they were added, here are nine features in LibreOffice-and its cousin Apache OpenOffice-that you should think twice about using unless you are trying to re-create some of the monstrosities of the early decades of the office suite. Some of these features look as though they might date to LibreOffice’s first incarnation as StarWriter in 1984, because they result in the kind of excess that people used to commit when office suites were new. Rather, I am talking about features that make users look clueless-features that encourage typographical nightmares of illegibility or excess. Still less am I talking about features such as the fields for hidden text or paragraphs that have only a handful of users but remain essential for rare yet sophisticated purposes. Nor am I talking about the interface, which, although serviceable, is decidedly uninspired. I’m not talking about features like master documents in Writer that have become less useful as the average amount of RAM on a workstation has risen into the gigabytes. However, it is also burdened by useless baggage-features that are hopelessly obsolete today and should never be used by anyone hoping to create an impression. LibreOffice is essential to the Linux desktop.

Libreoffice writer typer