Using styles in Openoffice Writer

Adding character
The styles we’ve discussed so far are known as paragraph styles because, when applied, they affect an entire paragraph. There are times, however, when only a small selection of text needs a different look; for example, a quotation.

Look at the top of the Styles and Formatting window and you’ll see a group of five icons on the left-hand side. These represent the collections of style for different elements of your document, with the Paragraph styles we’ve just discussed first from the left. Now, with a single sentence selected, click the second icon from the left to display the Character Styles. Double-click on the Quotation style to apply this to the text.

When copying and pasting text from one file to another styles often get copied from document to document, which can be frustrating. This adds unwanted styles to your document, making the Styles and Formatting window more difficult to work with.

The simplest solution to this problem is to remove styles from the text before copying it. To do so, select the text and click ‘Clear formatting’ from the Style menu on the toolbar. Copy and paste it into the new document, and then return to the source document to return the original section to its rightful style.

So far we have used styles to give a more consistent look to a document, but with no personal touches ­ for these, we need to create or amend existing styles. Begin by selecting some text and setting the Paragraph style to Default. Right-click on the Default entry in the Styles and Formatting window and then left-click on the ‘Modify...’ option that appears in the menu.

A dialogue box then displays the Paragraph Style formatting options. Click on the Font tab and change the font to Arial –­ which many people regard as a cleaner font than Times New Roman –­ and set the size to 13 so that it is easier to read –­ a sample sentence in the dialogue box previews your changes. Click on OK and all the text on the page will be updated.

Right-click on the Heading 1 text in the Styles and Formatting window, select Modify and then click on the Font tab. This time, instead of choosing the font size by the normal measurement of point size, the size of the text is a percentage. This makes sure that headings are always bigger than the body text, even if this is changed again later on.

Styles don’t just affect the look of the font; click on the other tabs in the Paragraph Style window to see the possible options. The Indents & Spacing tab is particularly worth exploring as it gives precise control over the spaci ng between paragraphs and does away with the need for double carriage-returns.