A facility to tell what settings are 'inherited' from another style
I think it would be beneficial to be able to quickly identify which properties in a cell style etc. inherit from a parent style.
If you look at my child.png , it is "Based On" parent.png. However, you can't see in the child what settings have been "learned" from the parent. It would be nice if the inherited characteristics appear with a light grey background or a little star or something suitable to distinguish them from the edits that are child-specific.
In my case, how this situation caused minor confusion is that I had "no idea" why the background fill colour for my new child cell style was coming out orange. Well, of course, I knew, but it took a while to find the setting that needed changing.
That is because I wanted to edit the fill colour, and my mind was looking for a setting that showed up in bright orange. My brain was not thinking "search for Fill Colour", it was thinking "I'm looking for something in bright orange that shouldn't be bright orange anymore because it looks awful"; less a few swear words in between.
Then again, maybe this inability is simply a characteristic of this particular blade for settings strokes for cell borders. I find that I need to control different attributes for each of the four borders of a cell.
For this particular blade, it is a very confusing process. I struggle to work out what borderline I am editing and what borderline I am leaving alone. I often destroy the edits that I have made to one of the other cell borders in the process.
I think I have figured out how to border selector works, but the choice of blue and black without any explanation as to what blue or black means is almightily confusing.
Kind regards
Mike Howell
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Jorge commented
The inability to know this is specially jarring with Object styles. I cannot wrap my head around the fact that you can base an Object style on another, but cannot know what properties are inherited from the “based on” parent style, and which ones are overriding it.
With paragraph and character styles, you at least get the list of inherited properties in the style’s options ▸ General ▸ Style Settings (I still consider this insufficient, as I feel I should be able to tell by looking at each property field, and being able to individually Reset To Base individual properties in General ▸ Style Settings…). AFAIK there is no such list at all in the case of Object styles.
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Josh Langman commented
This would be beneficial for styles of all kinds. Maybe each parameter in the style could even indicate which style it is inherited from.