Wish: mode to not allow any direct formatting in Writer

[ContractWriter]

I work on documents with teams and consistent formatting throughout the document is critical.

I wish I could create a document in a mode where NO DIRECT FORMATTING IS POSSIBLE. Everything must use either character or paragraph styles. Because every time we do a document I have to train my team, once again, not to use direct formatting, and then they do it anyway and I have to fix it and train them again… why? Direct formatting is always a mistake in any large, serious document. It only makes sense in small documents where consistent style isn’t a big concern.

Even more amazing would be if I could have it pull styles from an external document so no one could even edit styles and every document produced would be locked to the same style source. Alternatively, being able to simply pull all styles from another document, so once a document is done I can say, “ok, use the exact same styles as this other document.”

This would just be amazing for anyone who produces large documents with a team.

Can this be done?

[Hrbrgr]

Wishes and suggestions are out of place on this page. On this page users try to help other users.

You can submit your wish on [Bugzilla](https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/).

How to Report Bugs in LibreOffice

[ajlittoz]

Unfortunately, barring direct formatting from Writer is impossible because several actions are direct formatting-only and can’t be configured in styles. One example: restart list numbering.

Sometimes, direct formatting is even the best solution because it is associated to an exceptional “event” in the document, e.g. the change from the cover style page’s) to the preface style page (when the first paragraph here as no special style): a manual forced break is right.

The most effective mitigating measure is providing your team with your company-approved templates and warn them that any produced document will be applied a Ctrl+M command. This does not impact the direct formatting-only commands I alluded to above.

For this to be effective and accepted, you must be ready to discuss your charting with your team because you won’t succeed with the style set on first try. Here, I don’t mean the appearance of the set but the various styles (=names) required for the semantic markup of the text. This is more important than the visual attributes (font face, weight, angle, colour, …) because the team can start working even if the result is ugly. Tuning the appearance can be done afterwards. You change the template and the documents are updated when they are opened next time.

To show the community your question has been answered, click the ✓ next to the correct answer, and “upvote” by clicking on the ^ arrow of any helpful answers. These are the mechanisms for communicating the quality of the Q&A on this site. Thanks!