Does LO 5 have a style name area?

MS Word has a style area to the left of the text area, whose width can be set. See:
“When you set the style area width and change your view to Normal (Word 2003) or Draft (Word 2007, 2010), your document will have an area on the left that shows the paragraph styles used for each paragraph.”

Does LO 5 have this feature? The Styles and Formatting sidebar is not what I want.

The Styles and Formatting sidebar is not what I want

Then describe how is it different from what you need.

I remember that much older versions of Word had a question mark button in a toolbar. If you clicked it and then clicked anywhere in the text, it would display an overview of all formatting applied to the text with the cursor in it. That’s probably close to what the OP wants, except he doesn’t want to click that button every time, so he wants an area that lists the formatting of the paragraph where the cursor sits.

You can move the Style and Formatting sidebar to the left hand side and resize it. By choosing APPLIED STYLES and say PARAGRAPHS, this will display a list of the PARAGRAPH STYLES being used in the document, ditto PAGE, CHARACTERS, TABLES, LISTS etc.

When you place the cursor in the text, the current style is highlighted. Right click and you can select to display the relevant style. However, you must use the normal .odt format. Word does not provide the same support for styles.

Do not forget that STYLES in LibO are more extensive than used in Word, so the two do not compare directly. I personally prefer to have the sidebar on the right as the text is more important for me and always on the left.

Unfortunately Writer has no similar feature.
The Style Area is one if the Word features I miss most.

I have used Word to clean-up the styles in ODT files.
Take a look at some of the LibreOffice documentation ODT files in Word with the Style Area active - wadda mess.

It really helps to be able to see all the applied styles in place.

Sorry. I really miss that feature too.

It’s possible to show only the applied styles, selecting it on the bottom of styles sidebar.

Been there, done that.
That is where you can see the long list of style soup in the documentation files.
But this does not enable you to easily scan and see where those styles are applied.
The Word Style Area is a GREAT feature and LO has nothing comparable.

You two (@LibreTraining and OP) keep telling that that thing is great; still no clear description of what is the great that we miss. Can’t you two just understand that without such descriptions and proper enhancement requests, others would not even know what is lacking?

The original question was asking if LO has a similar feature.
No it does not.
Asked and answered.

Suddenly now we are supposed to post feature requests in the comments?
Suddenly now we are allowed to post feature requests in this Q&A thing?

The Ray-the-moron primary user persona is not going to use a style area.
So why bother submitting a feature request for knowledgeable users?
Seems to be a waste of time from the ridiculous “discussions” I have seen go on in the bug tracker.

Heh, that simple? :slight_smile:

I have been using LO, then teaching users, now coding for LO, for many years already, and I cannot claim that I know each and every feature in it. Manytimes I answer “something is impossible”, I find the next answer proving me wrong. And I keep learning from that. Are you sure you really know the suite that good to assert this?

Well, even if you are correct… When children come to a store, they might want “that doll” because it is “that doll”, without rationales. But …

… reasonable people usually learn to look for ways to fulfill some tasks, not to seek same-looking toys. And even they often use wording that looks like “I want this toy”, usually what they actually need is to know how to have something done. So direct answer like that is mostly useless, if there is another way to do the same. People may even be unaware of presence of different approaches, hence the naive question.

Well, even if this asker wanted specifically feature looking the same …

The fact that OP came here asking for that proves that there are people who want that. So reasoning like “why bother submitting a feature request for” … looks strange. I simply can’t get this logic - and inclined to think it’s just fallacy of reasoning. Posting descriptions of the feature to Ask site (to allow other knowledgeable users to answer better) and mentioning bug reports (to inform askers about them) is important part of answering.

But there’s even more…

… the site is public, and one of its main goals is to allow users find already answered questions. We often don’t see how many people come here, find what they need, and go on - because that doesn’t leave traces - we only see those who (re-)ask. But ignoring future users by “just answering direct question” is wrong use of the site, too.

And when I asked for proper enhancement request, I never meant to post it here; just to file it properly and post here a link.

My original post describes what Word 2003 has. You can find a description of it online. I cant find anything about a style area for LO. Other suggestion made here are appreciated, but not nearly as useful. Thanks anyway, though.

You can find a description of it online

I asked for clarification from you, because it’s you who needs some answer here, not the others who “can find” - but they don’t need it. When you ask an advice on any site, you should never expect others to have any knowledge on any external topic (like other software), or any incentive to search for information that you choose to omit. Others may have necessary knowledge to help you if you provide necessary data, no more. Show your respect to others.

Quoting @louarnold:"… your document will have an area on the left that shows the paragraph styles used for each paragraph."
How so? A paragraph has one paragraph style in my understanding. This style is shown in the ‘Styles’ “area”: floating or sidebar mode. If not active, call it with F11.
Or are you talking of a sloppily merged de-facto paragraph style created by overlaying direct formatting to the style primarily chosen?

Blah, blah, blah!

Sorry. Although trying to be polite, I cannot cope well with fools.