I've been asking around for a solution to this work issue for more than a decade.

I always find it hard to understand why it is so hard to understand how useful an option like this would be for some people.

Always useless to say that this option was very naturally incorporated into predecessors and early versions of OpenOffice. Then developers, so it seems, just stopped seeing the use of it and became blind to the needs of writing people.

So I have little hope that people who might be able to fix the problem will understand what the problem is. Strange stupidity. (Sorry - I just spent too much time on postings about this.)

And I am absolutely certain that for experts who are good at macros and programming it would be absolutely easy to do this. The problem is, nobody seems to be interested in helping a certain subgroup of writing people.

Have I given up? Not really. Under PlayOnLinux, a very old addon named "Workspce.dot" still works. Unfortunately, under Win7 it doesn't. Maybe there are ways to reanimate it. Strangely enough, in Google "Workspce.dot" does not generate any hits any more!