What Are Styles?

Getting Started with Apache OpenOffice 4

Chapter 2: Using Styles and Templates

< Previous Section

Next Section >

• What is a Template?
• What Are Styles?
• Applying Styles
• Modifying Styles
• Creating New (Custom) Styles
• Copying and Moving Styles
• Deleting Styles
• Using a Template to Create a Document
• Creating a Template
• Adding Templates using the Extension Manager
• Editing a Template
• Changing the Template Assigned to a Document
• Setting a Default Template
• Organizing templates
• Examples of Style Use

< Previous Page

Next Page >

What Are Styles?

A style is a set of formats that you can apply to selected elements such as pages, paragraphs, characters, frames, cells, and other elements in a document to quickly set or change their appearance. When you apply a style, you apply a whole group of formats at the same time.

Many people manually format paragraphs, words, tables, page layouts, and other parts of their documents without paying any attention to styles. For example, they might specify the font family, font size, and any formatting such as bold or italic.

Using styles means that instead of applying “font size 14pt, Times New Roman, bold, centered”, you can apply (for example) a “Title” style, if you have defined the “Title” style to have those characteristics. In other words, using styles means that you shift the emphasis from what the text (or page, or other element) looks like, to what the text is.

Using Styles Is Highly Recommended

Apache OpenOffice is a styles-based program. Using styles effectively requires some planning, but the time spent in planning can save time and effort over the longer term.

Because styles apply whole groups of formats at the same time, you can easily format a document consistently and change the formatting of an entire document with minimal effort. For example, the font family, size, and color of the headings in this document are set with a style. If you want to change those characteristics, editing the style takes a few seconds. If those headings had been formatted manually, changing them would require selecting every heading and applying the new settings. In addition, styles are used by Apache OpenOffice for many processes, even if you are not aware of them. For example, Writer relies on heading styles (or other styles you specify) when it compiles a table of contents. Some common examples of style use are given in "Examples of Style Use".

Type of Styles in Apache OpenOffice

Apache OpenOffice supports the following types of styles:

• Page styles include margins, headers and footers, borders and backgrounds. In Calc, page styles also include the sequence for printing sheets.
• Paragraph styles control all aspects of a paragraph’s appearance, such as text alignment, tab stops, line spacing, and borders, and can include character formatting.
• Character styles affect selected text within a paragraph, such as the font and size of text, or bold and italic formats.
• Frame styles are used to format graphic and text frames, including wrapping type, borders, backgrounds, and columns.
• Numbering styles apply similar alignment, numbering or bullet characters, and fonts to numbered or bulleted lists.
• Cell styles include fonts, alignment, borders, background, number formats (for example, currency, date, number), and cell protection.
• Graphics styles in drawings and presentations include line, area, shadowing, transparency, font, connectors, dimensioning, and other attributes.
• Presentation styles include attributes for font, indents, spacing, alignment, and tabs.

Different styles are available in the various components of Apache OpenOffice, as listed in Table 1.

Apache OpenOffice comes with many predefined styles. You can use the styles as provided, modify them, or create new styles, as described in this chapter.

Table 1. Styles available in Apache OpenOffice components

Style Type	Writer	Calc	Draw	Impress
Page	X	X
Paragraph	X
Character	X
Frame	X
Numbering	X
Cell		X
Presentation			X	X
Graphics	(included in Frame styles)		X	X