r/libreoffice

Hi everyone,

I'm having a frustrating issue with LibreOffice Writer and the Navigator panel.

Whenever I browse through my list of saved bookmarks, selecting/clicking on a bookmark automatically resets the Navigator scroll position back to the very top of the list.

This makes navigating through a document with many bookmarks very inefficient, as I constantly have to scroll all the way back down to find where I was and select the next one.

What I need: I want to be able to scroll through the bookmarks list, click/select a bookmark, and keep the list at its current scroll position so I can continue browsing from where I left off.

Is there a hidden setting, a workaround, or a specific key combination to prevent the Navigator from jumping back to the top? Or is this a known bug/limitation?

LibreOffice version: 26.8.03
OS: Windows 11

Thanks in advance for any help or suggestions!

Introduction
I want to begin by saying that I have not uninstalled LO, I want to keep using it and I believe in its future. Nevertheless, after several months of trying very hard to use it as a serious platform to write a paper, I ended up giving up and switching to Microsoft Office where I could finish my paper without issues. I took a few notes that I wanted to share with everyone else and specially with the team, with hopes that some of these issues can be addressed in the near future. Furthermore, I also briefly tried to use Impress as a substitute to PowerPoint but I gave up much faster because it truly was a much less refined experience and severely limited my work. For this reason, my feedback for Impress is much more limited.
The version I used while collecting this feedback was 26.2.6

LibreOffice - Writer

The Track Changes tool is underdeveloped. After accepting / rejecting one change, it did not seem to automatically jump to the next edit in line, instead, it jumped to the next edit done in time which might not be the one following immediately after in the text. Both options should be available and switchable with an easy to find toggle, with "position in text" probably selected by default. Furthermore, the option to hide resolved comments was not fully working. Indeed, resolved comments would reappear every time you "undo" the text, forcing you to re-hide the comments that you resolved. Finally, some edits would be shown as plain text even if "track changes" was selected.
Cross-compatibility with MS Office is still bad (using .odt). Figures would disappear. I found a workaround based on using .png images instead of .pdf but that did also not work consistently and some figures would disappear nonetheless when the document would be opened in MS Office.
I use Zotero as a citation manager. The iteration of the manager / plugin that I used was quite bad and clunky, however, I assume that this is on Zotero's side and not LO. For comparison, the performance of Mendeley citation manager was significantly better, and the plugin was better integrated.
Themes don't apply well and some options did not appear to have any effects regardless if they were toggled or not. In my case, even when changing to light themes, certain icons remained as the system default (dark).
LibreOffice has a huge amount of options and customisation. It really is impressive but navigating the menus and sub-menus of Writer is a nightmare unless you know where to look. Furthermore, information online is sometimes outdated, leading you nowhere. For this reason, I think that LO should follow on the path of MS Office and include a search bar where keywords can be typed to find the desired option (e. g. I should be able to type "themes" or "appearance" or "customisation" and find the right option).
I do not know where to find the option to change the size of icons in my toolbar. This was an option before, but the information online is outdated.
DPI integration is really bad. Even if icon size could be editable, not all the interface scales well. The most egregious example are the boxes for font and / or style. Their size remains unmodified and does not scale at all (tested only when trying to reduce the size of icons).
Figures and footnotes: The current (or now, past) iteration of this is also quite terrible. When a new figure is added, it creates an invisible frame that hard-caps the caption attached to the figure, meaning that if the figure is thinner than the width of the text, the caption will also be thinner. As far as I know, there is no way to modify the width of this "frame" without being forced to resize the figure. Furthermore, if figure captions are a bit on the longer end, the text will become hidden behind the figure frame, showing only a small, right-pointing arrow that can be clicked on or expanded. The frame can be vertically resized, nevertheless, this resize isn't saved and resets every time that the document is opened. This is a very serious drawback and one of the main reasons that ultimately forced me to drop LO altogether, I can't emphasise enough how bad is the issue with this system of "embedded frame" for figures, and what a terrible headache it is to work with.
Figure positioning options are confusing, even when reading the documentation it is hard to understand what is intended to do what. Furthermore, they are also prone to breaking and acting erratically.
Cross-references break all the time and showcase an "Error!..." message within the text. The worse part is that you can't search for "Error!", they seem to be invisible to the search tool and it won't show up despite being in the text.
When creating a new label, it is currently impossible to use a space between two words (e.g. "Supplementary Figure"). Instead, you are forced to use underscores, which is unacceptable in final format documents.
The bullet point system is also underdeveloped. In the version I tested, it could not be easily modified / edited. Bullet point sizes are hard or impossible to edit. Another example is combining bullet point styles: it is currently impossible to create a system that would allow the user to have bullet points, to number sub-points, or letters to number sub-points.
Unfortunately, it still feels slower and clunkier than MS Office Word, specially when using heavy documents with many pages and images.
There seems to be issues with styles, not applying correctly, or, if a certain style is edited, not updating the text that has that given style. However, I did not experiment a lot with this so I don't have much more feedback.
The Search / Replace tool is currently inferior to that of MS Office Word. It is more intrusive and it is difficult to go from search to search&replace. The list of found words (with small bits of context) shown on the left pop-up column from MS Office Word Search tool is good and missing in LO Writer. Other great examples of how to apply a good Search&Replace tool can be found in Notepad++ or Rstudio.
Save As could include a .pdf option. I should not have to navigate all the way to export to save as .pdf which is the gold standard format for many documents. This is an issue in many other text editors and something that could make LO stand out.
It is impossible to change the font of a text if it is in a font that is not installed in the machine. Selecting it and changing the font does nothing and the text remains in the uninstalled font. I am unsure if this is a bug or a feature, perhaps LO Writer could offer a pop up warning that the font you are about to change will be lost and you won't be able to switch back to that font because it is not installed in the system.

Impress Feedback

The options to change the background are very limited and it is very difficult to customise. You can't crop the picture, can't resize it, can't change its transparency or do any sort of modification to it. There is also no option to "Set to all slide" or "set to current slide only" or "set to slides [X]" (so, not just all or current, but let's say slides 4,8 & 16, for example).
The option to modify the transparency of text boxes is often used in presentations but difficult to find in Impress (it's not part of background colour, I think it was in "area" options). Finally, even when I found it and tried changing the transparency, it did not work.
There isn't an "apply" option for styles (edit>styles). That means that when testing different styles, you can't quickly switch from one to another. Instead, they all have to be approved, the textbox will close and then you have to re-navigate and reopen the menu each time. This makes the process of style editing painfully slow. There must be an option to preview the style or apply it without closing the editing window.

Unfortunately I couldn't continue trying to make impress work because it was too time consuming. The impossibility to easily edit text boxes was the deal breaker but there might be other important features worth highlighting that I have missed because of my limited experience with it.

General feedback

If my cursor is placed anywhere in the last row of a paragraph and I press "arrow down", the editing point should travel to the end of that row (as if I was pressing "End". It currently stays in the same place, unaffected.

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