What's the rationale for not being able to delete standard templates and styles?

English
#1

I understand clearly that some standard templates and styles cannot be deleted. And I can imagine that LO needs a few basics (like ‘Default Paragraph’) to function predictably. But I don’t understand why there have to be so many unremovable standards. I don’t use most of the standard styles, and they’re constantly unfolding so that they take up most of the space, with my custom styles at the bottom.
And I do use the ‘My Templates’ category. But why do I have to keep ‘Standard Business Letter’ or whatever? I will never, ever use that.

I understand that this policy exists. I understand how to mitigate its effects. But why is it there at all?

#2

Why you want to delete them?

  • They not consupt many place on the storage device.
  • Many of then are used in the features (like the Heading paragraph styles are used in the chapter numbering (by default - of course you can use other styles too).
  • Default styles helps average Users, and the Beginners to use the Styles. Users arrived from the MS hell have not experience in the creating of the Styles. (There are not Page Styles, and there are automatically created styles in the older MSO. (I have not new versions of MSO).)
  • You can disappear them from the Style list (located on the Sidebar), by usage the Custom Styles option.
#4

It doesn’t really matter why I don’t want them.* The question is why I must have them. I grant Default Paragraph, Headings, TOC, and maybe a few others, but does Complimentary Close really have to be specified?

Your answers suggest why such styles are included in a default installation, but not why they cannot be deleted. Using the Custom Styles view doesn’t offer a hierarchical view, which is often helpful with nested styles.

  • The answer is simply that I like things to be tidy. It’s more confusing than helpful to an advanced user to have all these useless styles hanging around, getting in the way. The best mitigation I’ve seen is to rename and redefine default styles to something useful, but unfortunately I didn’t think of that years ago, and now I have decades of documents that rely on custom styles.
#6

You have another solution which is valid either when editing a document with a “stabilised” set of styles or after your writing has “warmed up” the document so that the set of used styles has stabilised.

Choose UsedApplied Styles from the menu at bottom of the style side pane.

By “stabilised” above, I mean your text contains sufficiently enough text (paragraphs, words, pages, …) so that you can consider all “useful” styles are present. Then you can switch display so that only relevant styles are shown.


Suggestion fixed after @EvilOverlord1’s remark below.

#7

I don’t seem to have a ‘Used Styles’ option, though perhaps you meant ‘Applied’? Still not hierarchical, though.

Version: 7.6.5.2 (X86_64) / LibreOffice Community
Build ID: 38d5f62f85355c192ef5f1dd47c5c0c0c6d6598b
CPU threads: 12; OS: Windows 10.0 Build 22631; UI render: Skia/Vulkan; VCL: win
Locale: en-US (C); UI: en-US
Calc: CL threaded

#3

Your question mixes two different things: templates and styles.

  1. Styles.
    The idea is that the standard styles are those that are used by some built-in functions, like some wizards or automated actions (even if you never use that functionality). On the other hand, it may happen that some styles were added as “standard” just because of someone’s preference, without actually being referenced by some functionality. Then bugs are needed, to find and fix such cases.

  2. Templates.
    The only reason that you can’t delete standard templates is that they are in a read-only, shared storage, which can’t be modified without admin rights. No problem going to share/template, and dropping whatever you don’t need. But indeed, you should understand that the next update will restore that.

1 Like
#5

I think these are interdependent. For example, it’s hard to see an argument for mandating the Complimentary Close style unless it’s because it’s used in the Modern Business Letter template. I have no need for either.

Thanks for the tip on deleting, but if the templates will just be recreated, that sounds like more trouble than it’s worth. It’s just frustrating that a program that is in many ways flexible has what seem to be unnecessary obstacles and inconsistencies (like non-hierarchical page styles). Maybe I’ll learn to code so that I can contribute solutions.

#8

No, it’s because you don’t know where it’s used besides; it’s used in fax wizard, which fits into “used by some built-in functions, like some wizards”.

#9

Your approach of programming yourself is a really good idea.

If you want to give your idea of being able to delete styles provided by LibreOffice a chance, you need to submit a feature request on Bugzilla.

How to Report Bugs (and feature requests) in LibreOffice

#11

I’m sure that’s true. My point remains, however. It gets in the way and is only used in a function most people have no use for. Fine in itself, if I could also get rid of it.

#12

Making things infinitely configurable needs infinite humanpower. Doers decide what features to implement. As you intend to become one of the doers, you have all the devices to implement what you need.

#13

I’m not sure how we got from “I’d like to delete a style” to “infinitely configurable”, but I hope we can just agree to disagree and let it go.

#14

Simple. Since you know now that a style is needed by a built-in function (fax wizard, in the specific case of the style you mentioned explicitly), you must realize that removal of that style would break the function - maybe to the point of a crash. To make it work, we would need to make the function detect the absence of the style, and either disable itself, or change its behavior.

Every small “I’d like Foo” always looks innocent and straightforward to the user who needs that. It becomes obvious that it is strictly equal to “infinitely configurable”, when you start to develop / maintain yourself :wink:

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