Attribute Painter

[alans]

I have been testing each release of StarOffice and OpenOffice in the hopes that one or the other would now meet my firm's minimasl requirements for ditching Word and going over to Linux in toto. OO is almost there. Two items have yet to be introduced.
1) An attribute painter like Word and Excel's yellow paint brush icon; ans
2) Flexible tables. OO currently only offers a grid. The columns have to be the same width. We need tables where any individual cells can be any width and heights of a multiple of any number of rows.

What are the chances?

[Kaaredyret]

The format painter in Word/Excel is what you call 'attribute' painter, but an attribute painter is exactly what is is. The format painter is not popular on this forum, people advise OOo users to styles instead of copying formating.

But I have used the format painter in Word to copy styles from other paragraphs in my document, and the format painter in Word is quite intelligent. Instead of selecting one paragraph in Writer and the clicking on some style in the navigator, you can select the format painter button (twice selects it permanently) and copy one style to several paragraph with almost no effort... in Word. I have seen it copy different styles and formatting intelligently in tables, paragraphs etc.

OOo is far from a complete product, lots of features have higher priority than the format painter, so I guess this is one feature that will not appear in OOo 2.0.

I would like to see it in Writer later on, though, yesterday I used the format painter on some rather complex paragraphs and tables using different styles, and formating, but the format painter copied these attributes intelligently to other paragraphs below.

So, if arguments against the format painter are "use styles instead" I can only answer "But I do use styles" ...
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[Kaaredyret]

BTW, I do not understand your problems with tables... works for me? Works the same way as in Word, regarding the issues you mentioned? Explain it with an example, please.

(OOo 2.0 will come with much better handling of tables, and to my great joy a SEPERATE menu for tables. About time... Tabes are SO important, why hide them in the insert menu....)
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