“A couple of weeks ago, the OpenOffice.org User’s List featured
another round of explaining to a former WordPerfect user why
OpenOffice.org Writer didn’t have a Reveal Codes feature that
showed the raw encoding of the document for troubleshooting. This
time, the thread was started by a poster who insisted that he
needed the feature when he had to merge several documents into one.
The discussion made me realize that, although I tend to talk about
features in this column, sometimes work flow is more important.
Often, the problem isn’t the tools, it’s how you use them. After
lurking for most of the thread, I ended it with a suggestion about
how to use the tools in OOo to combine documents much more
efficiently than you could hope to do with Reveal Codes. What
follows is an expanded version of my suggestion that reinforces,
yet again, the advantages of using styles in many
situations…”