As suggested in bug 133300 comment 21, the Search and Replace dialog is already quite busy, and having the completely distinct search for styles functionality in the same view as the search for text does not help the user experience. The search for styles should be moved to a separate tab in the dialog. How the two functions differ is evidenced by the fact that most of the UI is greyed out when ticking "Paragraph Styles" (by my count, 11 elements become irrelevant), while the "Find" and "Replace" fields change from text field to fixed-value dropdowns. This would allow more space and flexibility for potential enhancements: - search and replace character styles: bug 78582 (already 4 duplicates) - search and replace page styles: bug 106884 (somewhat more controversial given how differently page styles are handled) Tested in: Version: 24.2.0.0.alpha0+ (X86_64) / LibreOffice Community Build ID: 24d0a62bd75b9a895c419aa165da648ab18f134d CPU threads: 8; OS: Linux 5.15; UI render: default; VCL: gtk3 Locale: en-AU (en_AU.UTF-8); UI: en-US Calc: threaded Paragraph Style search was already possible in OOo 3.3, so issue is inherited.
(In reply to Stéphane Guillou (stragu) from comment #0) > This would allow more space and flexibility... If the two tabs would be designed independently the dialog jumps when switching from left to right. But we scale dialogs for the largest content anyway meaning if we move content somewhere else it ends up in white space. Which is not necessarily bad.
The current design (combining string search and format search) is indeed confusing so this suggestion makes sense to me. I do not know if two tabs is the best way (though it sounds like a good approach);
The topic was on the agenda of the design meeting but didn't receive further input. The "Style" part applies to "Paragraph Style", "Attributes", and "Format"/"No Format". Searching for attributes/formatting in comments or via regex is possible now but quite unlikely needed.