In simple programs, that overview will look intuitive, but programs with really many functions will get a clotted UI, and the user will have to learn to work with it.Īt first I was as stumped by how to insert a “manual break” as you are about inserting a single landscape page, then when I found that thing in the Insert menu, and noted that you have to select a page style in the window that you get when you invoke that command, it was easy. It offers a kind of sorted listing of all commands (that’s what they were called at first) that the software has to offer. A GUI is a graphical user interface, as opposed to a textual user interface, like in MS DOS. Blaming users for not being able to understand the interface is the antithesis of GUI design. The fundamental idea of GUIs is to volunteer information to the user, so that they can easily discover how to use the program, without first studying the manual. In other words, you change your GUI control from elementary direct formatting to a more elaborate scheme. And, yes, styling can be done with GUI controls. And this can’t be achieved simply with direct-formatting. With Writer, you can design very very complex documents. WYSIWIG never meant it was easy to create the formatting in order to implement your goal. Writer is WYSIWIG, but get back to the acronym meaning: what you see on screen is what you’ll get on paper, full stop. Sorry to insist upon it, GUI-formatting is an easy way to get a taste about what can be done with Writer but to gain full control on its possibilities, there is no other way than to read some documentation, at least to grasp the founding principles. If you try to GUI-format (or equivalently to direct-format), you’ll quickly bump into limitations or conflicts like the one you described. This is where you discover the name of the features (but from personal experience it is sometimes very difficult to guess the effect of such and such sub-feature).īUT, formatting is not GUI-driven.

Style definition can be fully completed in GUI. From the very beginning, Writer is style-oriented. It depends on the balance between GUI and feature complexity.

Word landscape one page only