Documentation/Writer for Students/Theory
From Apache OpenOffice Wiki
Your thesis just as any other typical document, book or magazine will contain a number of recurring elements such as headings, footnotes, page layouts, the main text body, quotations, literature lists, pages etc. All these elements need to be formatted uniformly.
Additionally many of these elements, such as pages, headings, footnotes, lists, illustrations etc. need to be numbered.
Finally, the table of contents and other tables can then be generated automatically.
These various settings are all recorded in a few central locations and apply uniformly to the whole document independently of its length.