Types of styles in Calc

OpenOffice.org 3 Calc Guide

Chapter 4 Using styles and templates

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• Types of styles in Calc
• Accessing and applying styles
• Modifying styles
• Creating new (custom) styles
• Copying, moving, and deleting styles
• Creating a spreadsheet from a template
• Creating and editing a template
• Adding templates using the Extension Manager
• Setting a default template
• Associating a spreadsheet with a different template
• Organizing templates

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While some components of OOo offer many style types, Calc offers only two:

• Cell styles include fonts, alignment, borders, background, number formats (for example, currency, date, number), and cell protection.
• Page styles include margins, headers and footers, borders and backgrounds, and the sequence for printing sheets. The page size, orientation, and other attributes of a page style apply only when a spreadsheet is printed; they are not displayed onscreen.

Cell styles

Similar to paragraph styles in OOo Writer, cell styles are the most basic type of style in Calc. You can apply a cell style to a cell and that cell will follow the formatting rules of the style. Five cell styles are supplied with OOo: Default, Heading, Heading1, Result, and Result2.

Initially, the styles are configured so that if you change the font family of Default, then all of the other styles will change to match. We will discuss how to set this up in Creating new (custom) styles. The five standard styles can be seen in use below.

Calc cell style types.

Page styles

Page styles in Calc are applied to sheets. Although one sheet may print on several pages (pieces of paper), only one page style can be applied to a sheet. If a spreadsheet file contains more than one sheet, the different sheets can have different page styles applied to them. So, for example, a spreadsheet might contain one sheet to be printed in landscape orientation (using the Default page style) and another sheet to be printed in portrait orientation (using the Report page style).

Two page styles are supplied with Calc: Default and Report. The major difference between these two styles is that Report is portrait-oriented and Default is landscape-oriented. You can adjust many settings using page styles. You can also define as many page styles as you wish.

Because spreadsheets are primarily used onscreen and not printed, Calc does not display the page style on the screen. If you want a spreadsheet to fit on a certain page size, you have to carefully control the column width and row height, with only File > Page Preview to guide you.

Despite this limitation, it’s well worth defining page styles for any spreadsheets that you are likely to print. Otherwise, if a need for printing does arise, you may lose time to trial and error.