Writer clone formatting doesn't work

[needsleep]

why is it when I select a couple of lines with a header followed by a bullet, that clone formatter will not apply that to another area with the same kind of header and bullet? Instead, it doesn’t seem to do anything.

Position (dates at other end of the line)

Company - City, State

• accomplishments line 1

This ask LibreOffice page cannot show that there are no blank lines between the lines above, but Writer can do that, and that’s the format I want.

Writer will put Position and Company on two lines with no intervening vertical space. So far so good. But the area of concern is the extra vertical space between Company and accomplishments. Selecting Company through accomplishments of a good section and hitting Clone Formatter then dragging across a poorly formatted paragraph, will not override the format to erase the vertical space between Company and accomplishment, totally defeating the purpose of using Clone Formatter to begin with.

The only way to accomplish this, then, that I’ve figured out, is to copy in a good version of that paragraph, then overwrite it with new content. Probably not the way it’s designed to work! Maybe I need a different method to accomplish this. Can you help? Thanks.

[anon73440385]

Check your procedure with LibreOffice Help - Copying Formatting With the Clone Formatting Tool esp. with:
By default only the character formatting is copied ; to include paragraph formatting, hold down Ctrl when you click. To copy only the paragraph formatting, hold down Ctrl+Shift when you click.

[LeroyG]

(version 7.0.6.2) I can’t see any difference between holding down Ctrl and Ctrl+Shift when I click.

[ajlittoz]

I wouldn’t recommend any usage of Clone Formatting over several paragraphs. The tool may be adequate for a single paragraph because it will copy paragraph style, character style and perhaps direct formatting though I don’t see which consistent usage it could make from this last information. It may also be fit to clone styles but I don’t see the benefit over derivation and hierarchical organisation.

If you have a complex document, i.e. something which needs to be formally formatted with a consistent look across the whole, work with styles.

Styles are ubiquitous in Writer and it is the only method guaranteed to result in the required result. Any other method is bound to failure or will cost a tremendous amount of manual formatting.

For “professional” or sophisticated work, dump all these “direct formatting” tools and work exclusively with styles.

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