I like this feature in Microsoft Office 2007. This will help user to do a beautiful tables in fast manner.
Created attachment 55209 [details] sreenshot from MS office 2007
Thanks for new idea In Calc we have this functionality: select some cells, do Format->Autoformat. We can see some variants of formatting, but all as text. No preview with small icons. In some situations would be usefull to have such preview. In short: we want "Icons" preview mode for Autoformat for Writer and Calc
This would seem related to the enhancement to get table styles implemented (as that is what the screenshot from MSO 2007 is showing). Bug 34391 added to See Also list (rather than "Depends on" as this report is about AutoFormat).
Writer's AutoFormat Styles can be accessed via: - Styles sidebar - Table toolbar (dialog) - Table > AutoFormat styles... (dialog) In the dialog, it makes sense to have large previews, as we have currently. In the sidebar, preview icons would be appropriate, especially since there is the preview option available below. The icons could then also be reused in e.g. the tabbed user interface. Regarding Calc, the dialog can be opened with Format > AutoFormat Styles (when more than 3×3 cells are selected). In Calc's case, I can't see how where we could add thumbnails, unless AutoFormat Styles are added to the sidebar. (Not sure about alternative UIs, I have only checked the default and Tabbed interfaces.) Because of that, I'm renaming this report to focus on Writer. If you think Calc should have AutoFormat Styles in the sidebar, and thumbnails as previews in there, one (or two) extra enhancement request(s) could be created (so we can keep tasks focused, given that it is very unlikely both aspects will be solved in one go). But of course, this is very much related to the whole Table Styles issue, as Owen mentioned above.
*** Bug 137138 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Some valuable discussion and mockup in the duplicate Bug 137138.