I'm a freelance writer. I frequently work with documents in the range of 15,000
to 35,000 words.

Just as a programmer is expected to include #comments in his code, so too I am
expected to interject frequent directions to the editors and production staff
who evaluate and print my work.

However, just as #comments don't actually do anything in code, my comments --
called "House Notes" -- don't count toward my word count, so it is essential
that we're able to search and select all text formatted in "House Note" style to
measure to current actual word count of the document. (Some people prefer to
delete the house notes, count words, and Ctrl-Z undo; others prefer to count the
House Notes, use a calculator to subtract them from the total word count. The
result is the same.)

In Microsoft Word, this is easy -- in the Search and Replace dialog box, select
Format, Style, and then the style you want to search for. This works for both
Paragraph and Character styles equally well.

In OpenOffice.org, on the other hand, this simply is not possible. The OOo
search function does not recognize that Character Styles are styles at all,
making it impossible (or at least extremely difficult) to ascertain the actual
word count of our documents.

This defect is significant enough that it will deter a majority of the writers
who work for this publishing company from permanently switching to
OpenOffice.org. It probably affects thousands of other people as well who need
to be able to search for character styles.