Open Office Writer - Word substitute?

I've often read that Open Office Writer is an equally good and totally compatible program that can go head to head with MS Word any day of the week.

I admit that it is quite good in many ways, and some of my problems with it might be just to do with the fact that I have been using Word since 1992 (Mac version 5 and Windows version 2) and know a lot about its methods and its quirks.

One thing that Word has never done, however, is suddenly change the style of what you have just typed the moment you touch the return key. In Open Office, anything goes. Your text may be turned into a large heading, and the line spacing may be totally altered. This is really, really infuriating. Really.

Don't get me wrong. I'm highly in favour of using styles, but I'd like to be the one who decides which style, when and where.

I've already spent quite a lot of time struggling with this and looking for help. On the help front, it is quite hard to get past the eulogies assuring you that Open Office's system of styles is one of the best word-processing features in the known universe. There is some kind of insecurity at work here. Why do Open Office's devotees have to keep stressing how wonderful it is all the time?

To tame OO's manic styles, my only solution so far has been to change all of its preset paragraph styles (default, text body, headings...) to 12 pt Times to stop them from changing to something else of their own volition. The idea is that I can then create my own styles, ones that I can actually control. This almost works. It's still the case, though, the OO insists on regarding a single line at the top of a document as a heading and interfering in some way. If only it had a switch somewhere to turn its inbuilt style system right off.

Going back to 1992 (on a word processing nostalgia trip), I loved the style system of those old versions of Word. Let's say you wanted to change the standard paragraph style from 12 pt Times to 14 pt something else. You could just make the changes in a paragraph you were writing, then click on the name of the style in the the style window of the toolbar. At that moment a simple dialog box appeared, asking if you wanted to change the style's attributes or not. If you said yes, hey presto, you had amended the style. Some time in the 1990's MS stopped this from working and made changing and creating styles much more difficult.

That's progress.