How to 'Find' a Specific Heading

[agoragor]

In MS Word, working on a large document, outline view is a powerful organization and movement tool. Importantly, one can use ‘find’ to go directly to a specific heading. Perhaps I am missing something, but I have not been able to do so in Writer. ‘Find and Replace’ offers quite a few selection criteria (which ‘Find’ alone does not), but none of them allows me to limit the selection to headings.

I would be delighted to be proven wrong. The ability to ‘find’ a specific heading would open up Libre Office for me, which, sadly, I keep only as a secondary tool today. Any help would be appreciated.

[mikekaganski]

Answering directly to the “how do I use Find & Replace to limit the search to finding only in headings”: using [x] Outline under Attributes is what should do the trick. But it doesn’t, which should be filed as a bug.

[EarnestAl]

Open the side bar, click on the Compass icon, expand Headings to see Headings. Double-click on a heading in the sidebar to be taken to the Heading in the document.

This only works if you are using Styles (built-in Headings are styles). Moving a document backwards and forwards between Word and LibreOffice will lead to disappointment and frustration as some elements in each are not available in the other program.

[ajlittoz]

In addition to @EarnestAl’s answer, the Navigator (this is what the side pane with “Compass” data is called) allows you to move and reorder your “chapters”.

• click on a heading to make it “active” with all its depending levels and text
  This is a selection in the Navigator but there is no visual feedback neither in the Navigator nor in text

• use of of four “arrow button” to move the block

  • the “horizontal” buttons change level, keeping the level relationship within the block

    This changes levels of all sub-headings within the block. To change level for a single heading, change the style of the heading (Heading n to Heading m)

  • the “vertical” buttons move the block in the document

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[agoragor]

Thanks to the responders.

I should have emphasized more clearly, in my original question, that I was not asking about the use of the navigator, e.g., for moving paragraphs around. My question was about finding a particular heading, in a very long document, by means of some tool, rather than having to scan through the long list of all the headings in the navigator, hoping to locate the desired heading.

The note by Mike Kaganski does address this issue, but unfortunately it makes it clear that, at this stage, Libre Office’s tool (Find and Replace) is probably hampered by a bug. My experience has been that it is possible to specify a search string, then select ‘Paragraph Styles,’ but then, annoyingly, the search string is removed from the dialog box and replaced by the words ‘Default Paragraph Style.’

At this point I cannot spare the time to register at Bugzilla and file a bug report. Perhaps at some point in the future.

Thanks again for the willingness to help.

[ajlittoz]

Thanks for the feedback, but this doesn’t seem to be a new solution to the question. According to site rules, this should have been either an edit to your question or a comment. Be kind enough to use the more link (only you as owner can see it) to “repost as a comment”.