Don’t get me wrong, most of the time, I’m very happy with OpenOffice. The thing which infuriates me about it is the lack of control being exercised over the developers. It appears to be designed by committees which communicate haphazardly rather than with some Queen Bitch riding herd over them and directing their efforts.

The move towards XML Style Sheets was not a high point for word processing in general. Something which should have been handled behind the scenes simply keeps rearing its head in the middle of the user interface. Today, I had to re-learn something I have done in every “The Minimum You Need to Know” book: How to get numbers into my headings. This is one shining place where the XML back end needlessly slipped forward into the user interface. First let me explain what I’m talking about.

Chapter 9
Working With Stupid People

9.1 They Don’t Know They Are Stupid

The Number’s I’m talking about are the chapter number in the chapter heading and, more importantly, the 9.1 in the secondary heading. What you want to have happen is the chapter number increments with each new chapter and the subheadings keep count.

Everybody beats their head against the exact same wall. You hit the F11 key to bring up the style menu and try desperately to modify both Heading 1 and Heading 2. That is the logical place for such a feature to exist from a user interface perspective. Well, you are not even close when you look there. Why does everybody make this same mistake? Because you only need to do it once for the document and it just rolls merrily along after that. In the case of a book, it could well be a year before you need to know this again.

Hidden under the Tools menu is a menu item called “Outline Numbering”. You must click on this, then select “Heading 1″ for level 1, insert “Chapter ” in the _before_ field. (Don’t forget the space.) You must also choose 1,2,3 as the numbering format and tell it to start with 1. Next you click on the “2″ entry to choose the style for the second level. Here one must choose “Heading 2″; “1,2,3″, and most importantly, set the sublevel value to 2 or more. If you don’t change this value, you don’t get the nice little “9.1″, you get “1″.

I understand why the developer put it there, but they were just plain wrong for doing it.

Perhaps some day OpenOffice will be able to generate ePub file formats for the Sony readers and iPhones out there. Then, and only then, will the word processor focus shift to XML based storage begin to pay back a tiny fraction of the frustration it has inflicted upon the world. OpenOffice isn’t alone in this XML move, but currently it is the only one I see which is letting the XML back end slip through to the front end.