scott wrote:
>> And yet, no known word processor works like this.
> 
> Hahaha what? You mean you don't know how to use Styles in Word?  How on 
> Earth do you write anything longer than a few pages efficiently?

Isn't the answer obvious? "I don't".

(As far as I can tell, nobody else here knows how to work styles either. 
Granted, most of them wouldn't actually *care*, but our report writers 
certainly might...)

>> Both Word and OpenOffice provide "styles", but good luck figuring out 
>> how to work them. In particular, Word provides styles called "Normal", 
>> "Heading 1", "Heading 2", etc. But it seems to be physically 
>> impossible to *change* these styles.
> 
> Get up the style and formatting tool bar, then just click the style 
> drop-down menu and choose "Modify...".

Ah-hah. So there *is* a secret hidden tool for altering them! (At least, 
there is in Word 2003.)

Still puzzled as to why you have to open up a special window to do this. 
(I.e., why you can't just click on the style you want to change.) But 
then, this is from the program where you can't change any program 
settings unless you have a document open. (WTF?)

(Ooo, that's nice... If I change a style to match an existing one, the 
existing one gets deleted. And if I change the justification for the 
Normal style, the other styles update. Pitty you can't explicitly say 
which settings are applied in THIS style and which ones should just be 
inherited...)

>> (In particular, I utterly *hate* sans serif fonts. Yet all these 
>> programs always default to it. GRR! At least Excel lets you change the 
>> default worksheet font; OpenOffice Calc seems to lack any such option...)
> 
> Go to Word, change the "Normal" style to use Arial font, then save the 
> document as NORMAL.DOT (search to see where your NORMAL.DOT is currently 
> located and overwrite it).  Job done.

Well, you just described the steps to do the *opposite* of what I want 
to do (i.e., I want to change *from* Arial, not *to* it), but OK. Let's 
see now...

OK, no go. Word *refuses* to overwrite NORMAL.DOT because it's already 
open. (Duh!) God I hate Word! >_<

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