outlines in OOo

One of the things that people miss most in Openoffice is an outline mode. In fact, there is a pretty good substitute, hidden behind a witless interface. By assigning heading level to text styles, you can then organise and manipulate text in the navigator pane, which shows the first line of text with a heading level (headings below a certian level can be arbitratrily hidden). This is useful, and relatively easy. However, it is almost impossible to stumble on, since heading levels aren’t applied to styles by default. To find them, you have to go into tools/outline numbering and them apply heading levels, but NOT numbering to the styles you want to use in an outline. You can give plain text a low heading level, and then the system works properly. But why is it so ludicrously well-hidden? It has nothing to do with numbering at all.