Issue 37294

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.