Author: Michael Crider / Source: howtogeek.com
If you’re using the free and open source LibreOffice suite of programs, your word processor is probably way more powerful than it needs to be. Writer has at least as many standard features as the paid Microsoft Word, and getting more acquainted with some of them can help dramatically streamline your workflow.
In other words, spend a little time setting stuff up and you’ll fly through your documents like a 60WPM Superman.Today let’s take a look at the Styles tool, and how you can better adjust it for your particular work needs.
What Are Styles?
In Writer, a style is a collection of formatting information that you apply all at once, quickly and easily. A Style contains any combination of the following attributes:
- Indents and spacing
- Alignment
- Text Flow
- Font and Font Effects
- Position
- Outline and Numbers
- Bordering
- Transparency
- Highlighting
- Drop Caps
- Tabs
In other words, pretty much anything you can apply at the character or paragraph levels with the formatting tools one at a time, you can apply all at once by selecting a Style. This is incredibly useful if you’re creating a document that shifts regularly between text styles, like a press release with lots of titles and citations, or a data-heavy presentation with text charts and plenty of sub-heads. It makes applying all that formatting much easier, and also helps keep formatting consistent.
Writer comes equipped with a collection of commonly-used styles preinstalled. You can apply any of them by selecting any amount of text (a word, a sentence, a paragraph), clicking the Style dropdown menu, and then choosing a style.
If you can’t see the Style drop-down menu next to the font selector above the text area, click View > Toolbars, and make sure “Formatting (Styles)” is enabled.
To see all of the styles available at once, click the “Styles” dropdown menu, and then click the “More Styles” option at the bottom of the list. This opens a sidebar menu that shows all of the available styles in their formatted text.
Note that different Styles are used for different purposes and will affect different groups of text based on their properties. A character style applies formatting…
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