What is your question? Does it apply to M$ Word or to LO Writer?
Anyway, your thoughts emphasize a very important aspect of document writing: structure. Every document, be it a simple letter, exhibits clearly different significant parts (I don’t write “section” because this word has a special technical meaning in Writer) and it is good practice to mark up them accordingly.
First example: a letter
- initial ancillary information (logo or identification), place and date, et al.
- formal address (Sir, To whoever is concerned, or even Hi!)
- content paragraphs
- formal leave (regards, truly yours, etc.)
- final ancillary information (logo afain, legalese, postal data,…)
Second example: a book
- cover
- legalese
- toc
- preface
- chapters with heading and content of various semantic components
- annexes
- indexes
- back cover
Before starting to write the document, you must plan ahead and deeply think about the parts. This does not mean you already define their visual cues (though you can if you have a clear idea of the whole) but you mentally split your future intended content into semantic categories. These categories will translate into styles.
LO Writer has a wealth of styles forming a hierarchy: page, paragraph, character, frame, list and now table.
IMHO, M$ Word takes the problem from the wrong side. After having written a range of pages, you format them. In LO Writer, you first set the page style and then write your text not really caring if it uses 3 or 15 pages. As long as you don’t cause a page break (whether explict or implicit from the page style definition), the sequence of pages will share common visual attributes and adding or removing text will keep document consistency. Should you need to change page appearance, you know you can do that from a single location: the page style dialog.
However, editing an existing book can be a real pain when the original author has not correctly “marked up” the document with styles. I see too frequently people using direct formatting, thinking it is the same as styling because visual results are identical, since there is insufficient training or communication on the underlying effect and long term benefit of styling. Restyling an unstyled document is really like writing it again.
I know that designing a well balanced, elegant, minimal set of styles is difficult and people prefer immediately pouring in their ideas into a document instead of thinking ahead and seemingly losing a precious time. But a cleverly crafted set is not specific to a single document and can be reused. Here, you dramatically spare your precious time. Reuse comes in two forms under LO Writer: style import is the simplest though I dont find it “elegant”; template is the other one with all the benefits of automatic update though it might need extra planning (e.g. because a letter and a book will not share page styles and some paragraph styles will not be compatible despite having many common attributes).
To answer ironically your feature request, maybe the best method is to import your Word document into Writer, store it as an .odt document 'so that you don’t lose any bit of your work between sessions) and only export the final copy as a .doc file. You can event send it as .odt as recent Word versions understand at last ODF (I don’t know to which point).
To the community: please forgive me for expressing aloud ideas probably irrelevant to this site, but I don’t see significant progress in document design since typewriters obsoleted.
