Will LibreOffice Writer ever provide MS Word style outlining (not navigator)?
Great sympathy for the question - wee shame the discussion was ill-tempered on the part of some. I suppose it’s evidence for the importance attached to this feature. Using both MS Word and LibO Writer pretty much daily, I can attest for the usefulness of Word-style outlining!
Yes, great sympathy from me too : that question has been up since the old times of StarWriter, and the answers have been frustrating all that time.
Hi Kolja, I hear you. This is a real need for LibreOffice. I’m asking similar stuff over in the Libreoffice Forum. I’ve tried using their Navigator as an Outline tool, and it just does not work the same way.
In Word when you move the MAIN heading all the bits and bobs and images and EVERYTHING under that main heading moves with your MAIN heading. It will move EVERYTHING under the MAIN heading you’re grabbing… EVERYTHING under it until the next MAIN heading that is. Same with sub-headings… it will move everything until the next heading on the same level. It’s so easy. I’ve confidently moved whole sub-arguments up and down the page, around and around, or even sub-sub-arguments. I’ve moved whole MAIN HEADING CHAPTERS up and down, even if they are literally 20 pages long. They could be whole chapters in a book with dozens and dozens of subheadings! Bang! Moved before the previous Main headings, just like that!
Navigator only seems to move the main heading you try to move and a bit of text under it, and leaves lonely little sub-headings and sub-sub headings all alone like little orphans. Lost. Cluttered. Wrecked. I thought Navigator was like Outline in Word, and confidently started moving my main headings around… only to find they had collected sub paragraphs from OTHER main headings! Oh the mess I made of my documents!
I also feel the navigator has room to improve and filed an enhancement request fdo#58105
— Maybe you can add your comments to support the request
@Eclipse, I have update the link in your post to point to the correct thread in the other forum. Thanks for adding to this discussion.
@ROSt53 – I don’t want to use a different tool when working on structured text, I want to be able to work directly in the outline, not having to switch between tools. Navigator is perfect for navigating, but not for editing, really. And Writer is not a text navigator, by design 
Hey sceptics, why don’t you try MS Office Outline view and see for yourself how it works? Although I’m not sure If you’ll understand the importance of it if you do not write structured text. The way you write it is that you first make the outline of the document using multiple heading levels, then rearrange and fill up normal text as needed, gradually…
I’m certainly not a scaptic, but have been driven away from MS Word by the bloated file size, the screen hogging and unintuitive ribbon and most recently by MS insistence on a subscription model. These days I only use Word when I have to i.e. collaborative documents. Whilst I appreciate that LibreOffice can improve in some areas, I don’t EVER want it to go down the MS Dffice interface and bloatware route.
@Thing – I agree entirely with you comment; it is almost totally irrelevant to the issue at hand, of course, but I agree all the same.
@Thing – Critics about MS Word are justified, but really its Outline View is exactly what @kolja is telling : useful, useful, and helpful too.
Bug fdo#38093 is the primary related enhancement report to get this functionality in LO. Bug fdo#47746 (code folding) is related. Refer comments below.
I switched from Word a couple of weeks ago, and I must say that outlining is what I miss most in Writer. My personal prioriry ranking would be “absolutely required asap”.
I registered just for this, so please pay attention: WORD OUTLINING IS NOT THE SAME AS TEXT FOLDING! It seems to me that explaining outlining is futile to you guys. I’ve seen too many requests dismissed as “already implemented” in navigator or “not needed”. Please understand, it is a KILLER FEATURE of Ms Word, and I, as well as many people who produce large amount of structured documents, will not switch to Libre or Linux without the feature being available.
Also i must admit that I am very angry at you guys because you are dismissing our requests without a serious look into the feature itself. Why can’t you install MS Word and try to understand the feature, before you answer? If you did, you would not compare it to navigator or text folding.
When in MS Word, switch to outline view AND enable multilevel list (in paragraph settings) with automatic chapter numbers. This is THE way to experience the outlining feature (looks like this: 1. Heading1, 1.1. Heading2, 1.1.1. Heading3 etc). It enables me to promote and demote the parts of text (heading level hierarchy) and reorganize them (by reordering up or down). This is the essence of outlining, not the folding (which helps just a little)!
@kolja if I have answered incorrectly then rather than signing up and posting further derogatory comments I would suggest you post a better answer. You certainly seem know what the OP was referring to. On re-reading I acknowledge I got my answer wrong. I will amend it accordingly. It may be worth understanding that I am not a developer I am a user so your reference to “you guys” is probably not accurate. This is a user forum. If you feel the answers are not accurate, then provide your own.
Hi guys, I filed an enhancement request for this feature. I included images from both MS Word and Apple Pages. I only have osx so I couldn’t include anything from windows. The request is fdo#68167