Formatting in OOo Writer

An Introduction to Using Styles in OpenOffice.org Writer

Apr 28, 2009
Brendan Vittum

Figure 1: The Styles and Formatting icon. - B. W. Vittum

This article provides a quick introduction to Styles and to use them in the OpenOffice.org Writer software.

Many people manually format documents without ever paying any attention to styles. They design documents with hard-coded elements, instead of dynamic elements. In other words, by specifying font family, size, and other formatting like bold or italic for individual instances.

Styles are multiple formats which can be applied to any element in a document quickly changing the way all those elements appear.

Using styles means there is no longer a need to explicitly define “font size 14pt, Times New Roman, bold, centered”, instead text is entered, selected, and the style “Heading” applied because that style has been predefined to have the desired formatting. Through the use of styles a document's author can focus on what is said, rather than what it looks like.

Styles Supported By OpenOffice Writer

OpenOffice.org Writer supports the following style categories:

OpenOffice Writer Page Styles can include settings for margins, headers and footers, borders and backgrounds.
OpenOffice Writer Paragraph Styles control all aspects of paragraph appearance; text alignment, tabs, line spacing, and borders, as well as character formatting.
Character Styles affect specific text within paragraphs; font and size, or bold and italic formatting.
OpenOffice Writer Frame Styles control the format of graphic and text frames such as text wrapping, borders, backgrounds, and columns.
OpenOffice Writer Numbering Styles control the formatting for numbered or bulleted lists such as this one.

To apply these styles, the following steps can be taken.

Applying Styles in OpenOffice Writer

There are four basic ways to apply a Style to an OpenOffice Writer document. They are as follows:

Using the Styles and Formatting Window: The Styles and Formatting Window shows all styles available for OpenOffice Writer.
Using Fill Format mode: Fill Format can be used to apply a style to multiple portions of a document without having to repeatedly double-click the desired style in the Styles and Formatting Window.
Using the Apply Style List: Once a style has been used in a document, that style's name will be listed in the Apply Style List and can be applied by selecting it from this drop-down.
Using keyboard shortcuts: A number of predefined keyboard shortcuts styles exist in Writer. For example, Ctrl0 applies a Text body style, Ctrl1 applies a Heading 1 style, and so on. These shortcuts can be modified, or custom shortcuts can be created.

All of these Styles can be manipulated through the Formatting Window.

Using the Styles and Formatting Window

The Styles and Formatting Window shows all styles available for OpenOffice Writer. It can be accessed several ways; by clicking the Styles and Formating icon on the left-most edge of the Object Bar [Figure 1], by using the menus and clicking Format → Styles and Formatting, or by pressing F11. This window can be moved to a convenient location the screen, or docked to an edge of the document window.

Click on one of the icons at the top left of the Styles and Formatting window to display a list of styles for the particular category; Paragraph, Character, Frame, Pages & Lists.
Position the cursor at the beginning of the paragraph, frame, or page whose style is to be affected, then double-click on the desired style. For character styles, select the text in the document, then double-click the style name.

Using Fill Format mode:

Fill Format can be used to apply a style to multiple portions of a document without having to repeatedly double-click the desired style in the Styles and Formatting Window. This is useful when scattered items need to be formated with the same style.

Open the Styles and Formatting Window and single-click the style to be applied.
Click the Fill Format mode icon [Figure 2].
To set the style for a paragraph, page, or frame, hover the mouse over the element and click once. To apply character styles, selecting the text, Clicking on a word will apply style to the whole word.
To exit Fill Format mode, just click the Fill Format mode icon, or press the Esc key.

When this mode is active right-clicking in the document undoes the last Fill Format action.

Using the Apply Style List:

Once a style has been used in a document, that style's name will be listed in the Apply Style List and can be applied by selecting it from this drop-down [Figure 3].

Just open this list and click on the desired style you want, or use the up down arrows to scroll through the list and then Enter to apply the selected style.