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What are styles?

A style' is a set of formats that you can apply to selected pages, text, frames, and other elements in your document to quickly change their appearance. When you apply a style, you apply a whole group of formats at the same time.

OpenOffice.org 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 OOo, as listed in Table 1.

Table '1'. Styles available in OOo 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

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

Why use styles?

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

Styles are logical attributes. Using styles means that you stop saying “font size 14pt, Times New Roman, bold, centered", and you start saying “Title" because you have defined the “Title" style to have those characteristics. In other words, styles means that you shift the emphasis from what the text (or page, or other element) looks like, to what the text is.

Styles help improve consistency in a document. They also make major formatting changes easy. For example, you may decide to change the indentation of all paragraphs, or change the font of all titles. For a long document, this simple task can be prohibitive. Styles make the task easy.

In addition, styles are used by OpenOffice.org for many processes, even if you are not aware of them. For example, OOo relies on heading styles (or other styles you specify) when it compiles a table of contents.

Applying styles

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OpenOffice.org provides several ways for you to select styles to apply.

Using the 'Styles and Formatting window'Styles and Formatting window

1. 1. Click the Styles and Formatting icon inline:Graphic3.png located at the left-hand end of the object bar, or click Format > Styles and Formatting, or press F11. The Styles and Formatting window shows the types of styles available for the OOo component you are using. Figure 1 shows the window for Writer, with Page Styles visible.

You can move this window to a convenient position on the screen or dock it to an edge (hold down the Ctrl key and drag it by the title bar to where you want it docked).

1. 1. Click on one of the icons at the top left of the Styles and Formatting window to display a list of styles in a particular category.
   2. To apply an existing style (except for character styles), position the insertion point in the paragraph, frame, or page, and then double-click on the name of the style in one of these lists. To apply a character style, select the characters first.

Tip

At the bottom of the Styles and Formatting window is a dropdown list. In Figure 1 the window shows Automatic, meaning the list includes only styles applied automatically by OOo. You can choose to show all styles or other groups of styles, for example only custom styles.