It seems to me, Derek, that your extended explanations make their own point: it's complex and difficult. I am another user who has bounced off OOP's styling, giving up in mystified frustration when all I want to do is make the document look good. I'm quite prepared to accept that they have a logic that I could master with enough time, it's just that that's not a good use of my time.

What I'm used to in word processors and dtp packages is the notion of stylesheets. These control all the styles that apply to their object, either paragraph or character. In some cases one gets to control whether they are what one might term "absolute" -- 14pt Arial Bold -- or "relative" -- 14pt Bold of whatever font is already applied. Character styles can be applied to differentiate text within a paragraph and these typically survive when a new stylesheet is applied to the paragraph. They typically employ a hierarchy (heading 1, heading 2 etc) but there are also non-hierarchical elements for other purposes.

Something along these lines would be very welcome, along with the ability to specify the stylesheet to use by default for rows of a given level. Please consider this alternative to the current over-engineered system.

Many thanks