Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 37294
Need "Normal" layout view like MS Word
Last modified: 2004-11-17 18:34:09 UTC
Now that I'm using OOo regularly, the one thing I miss about MS Word is the "normal" layout view mode. What OOo calls the "normal" layout is what MS Word calls "page layout" view mode. There were two main things I really liked about MS Word's "normal" view as opposed to the "page layout" view: (1) In MS Word's "normal" layout view all I had to look at was text--there was nothing extraneous in the view window. That meant I could concentrate on writing the text, without having to worry about how it was going to look on the page. With "page layout" view I'm constantly distracted by all the other stuff in the view window--the margins, headers and footers, breaks between pages, and so on. The only time I even care about all that is when the document's nearly finished (and with good templates, it doesn't require much effort even then). (2) In MS Word's "normal" layout view I could write text in a multi-column document the same as a single-column document--the only difference was in the width of the text line as it was displayed. (Having the correct text line width is actually a good thing, because that's the one aspect of the final format on the page that it's often helpful to me to see while I'm writing--yes, I know that's an exception to #1 above.) But even with multiple columns I could still edit the document as a continuous stream of text. In "page layout" view every time I cross a column boundary the editor "jumps" to a new spot on the page, which is distracting. For these reasons I think having a layout view mode similar to MS Word's "normal" as opposed to "page layout" view would be a worthwhile feature in OOo.
reassigned to BH:
duplicate. *** This issue has been marked as a duplicate of 4914 ***
closing duplicate.