UNIT 1: DIGITAL DOCUMENTATION (ADVANCED)
1. CREATE AND APPLY STYLES IN THE DOCUMENT
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.
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 mean 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.
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.
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• 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.
APPLYING STYLES
OpenOffice.org provides several ways for you to select styles to apply.
➢ USING THE STYLES AND FORMATTING WINDOW
1) Click the Styles and Formatting icon 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 (OpenOffice.org)
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).
2) 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.
3) 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.
➢ USING FILL FORMAT MODE
Fill format mode is used to apply a style to many different areas quickly without
having to go back to the Styles and Formatting window and double-click every time.
This method is quite useful when you need to format many scattered paragraphs,
cells, or other items with the same style.
1) Open the Styles and Formatting window and select the style you want to apply.
2) Click the Fill Format mode icon .
3) To apply a paragraph, page, or frame style, hover the mouse over the
paragraph, page, or frame and click. To apply a character style, hold down the
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mouse button while selecting the characters, clicking on a word applies the
character style for that word. Repeat step 3 until you made all the changes for
that style.
4) To quit Fill Format mode, click the Fill Format mode icon again or press the
Esc key.
Caution When this mode is active, a right-click anywhere in the document undoes
the last Fill Format action. Be careful not to accidentally right- click and
thus undo actions you want to keep.
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CREATING NEW (CUSTOM) STYLES
You may want to add some new styles. You can do this in two ways:
➢ CREATING A NEW STYLE FROM A SELECTION
You can create a new style by copying an existing manual format. This new style
applies only to this document; it will not be saved in the template.
1. Open the Styles and Formatting window and choose the type of style you
want to create.
2. In the document, select the item you want to save as a style.
3. In the Styles and Formatting window, click on the New Style from Selection
icon (refer Figure 2).
4.
5. In the Create Style dialog, type a name for the new style. The list shows the
names of existing custom styles of the selected type. Click OK to save the new
style.
Figure 2: Naming a new style created from a selection
➢ DRAGGING AND DROPPING TO CREATE A STYLE
You can drag and drop a text selection into the Styles and Formatting window to create
a new style.
Select some text and drag it to the Styles and Formatting window. If Paragraph Styles
are active, the paragraph style will be added to the list. If Character Styles are active,
the character style will be added to the list.
MODIFYING STYLES
OpenOffice.org provides several ways to modify styles (both the predefined styles and
custom styles that you create):
• Updating a style from a selection
• Load or copy styles from another document or template
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Any changes you make to a style are effective only in the current
document. To change styles in more than one document, you need to
change the template or copy the styles into the other documents.
TIP
➢ UPDATING A STYLE FROM A SELECTION
To update a style from a selection:
1. Open the Styles and Formatting window.
2. In the document, select an item that has the format you want to adopt as a
style.
Caution Make sure that there are unique properties in this paragraph. For
example, if there are two different font sizes or font styles, that particular
property will remain the same as before.
3. In the Styles and Formatting window, select the style you want to update
(single-click, not double-click), then long-click on the arrow next to the New
Style from Selection icon and click on Update Style(Refer Figure 3).
Figure 3: Updating a style from a selection
➢ LOADING STYLES FROM A TEMPLATE OR DOCUMENT
You can copy styles by loading them from a template or another document:
1. Open the document you want to copy styles into.
2. In the Styles and Formatting window, long-click on the arrow next to the New
Style from Selection icon, and then click on Load Styles.
3. On the Load Styles dialog (Figure 4), find and select the template you want
to copy styles from.
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Figure 4. Copying styles from a template into the open document
4. Select the categories of styles to be copied. Select Overwrite if you want the
styles being copied to replace any styles of the same names in the document
you are copying them into.
5. Click OK to copy the styles. You will not see any change on screen.
To copy the styles from another document, click the From File button
Note
to open a window from which you can select the required document.
If your document has a table of contents, and if you have used custom
styles for headings, the heading levels associated with outline levels (in
CAUTION Tools > Outline Numbering) will revert to the defaults of Heading 1,
Heading 2, and so on when you load styles this way. You will need to
change these back to your custom heading styles. This is a bug.
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