Sams Teach Yourself StarOffice® 5 for Linux in 24 Hours

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Hour 9: Using Advanced Formatting Tools

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Using Text Styles


Styles are an advanced formatting feature that enables you to quickly format a block of text with several formatting options.

Styles are included in most major word processors, including Word, WordPerfect, and FrameMaker. This section describes how to set up and use styles in StarOffice.

Explaining the Concept of Styles

When you use the standard formatting options described so far (mostly in Hour 8, "Formatting Your Document"), you can set up text that is bold or double-spaced, or that has many other options set. StarOffice refers to this as soft-formatting; this is ironic because it can be pretty hard to set up these formatting options for your entire document.

The alternative is to use styles. A style is a named set of formatting attributes that you can apply all at once. If you need to make a single word bold, it's easy to select it and press the Bold icon on the object toolbar.

Suppose, however, that you have a long document with quotations scattered throughout. Each quotation paragraph needs to be spaced differently, with different margins, and in italics (those professors are sticklers for format).

Instead of choosing each formatting attribute for each paragraph, you can define a style--call it Quote--and then quickly apply that style to each quotation paragraph. When you apply the Quote style, all the formatting that you defined is applied at once to that paragraph.

Similarly, blocks of characters can have a style. For example, suppose you need to set all computer commands in a document to bold, italic, courier font. A style enables you to apply all these attributes at the same time.

Styles can be especially useful when you want to experiment with different formats. For example, assume you've formatted each of the headings in a large document with 24-point Bold Helvetica font. If you need to change all the headings to 20-point Italic Times font, it will take a long time to modify the document by hand.

With a style defined for the heading, however, you can change the attributes of the style--and all the paragraphs marked with that style change immediately.

The Style command allows you more power in quickly formatting a document.

Reviewing the Style Command

Before you start using the Style command, here's a look at a potentially confusing issue in StarOffice.

If you click the right mouse button on any block of text, a formatting menu appears. Part of that menu includes a Style submenu (see Figure 9.8).

This same type of information is shown in a different arrangement in the Character dialog box, which you can open from the Format menu by selecting Character, and then the Font tab (see Figure 9.9).

Please note that both of these style settings (as shown in the preceding figures) define font characteristics for a selected block of text, from a character to an entire document. This is a great way to change small amounts of text at a time; it can be a problem, however, if you want to change all the headings in a document, for example. Don't confuse these style settings with the paragraph styles described in this section.

A better way to manage the look and feel of your document is to assign a predefined set of characteristics to a style name. You can then assign these style names to any text you choose. Then, instead of changing the text one paragraph at a time, you can change them all at once by redefining the named style.

Figure 9.8
The Style submenu appears when you right-click on any text.

Figure 9.9
Formatting information labeled Style is also shown in the Font tab of the Character dialog box.

The styles discussed here are accessed in two places:

Opening the Stylist Window

The Stylist window contains a list of named styles that are defined for the document that you're viewing. Each document can have a different set of named styles.

Tip - You can import styles from another document into the current document by using Load from the Styles & Templates submenu on the Format menu.


From the Stylist window, you can apply any named style to a block of text in your document. You can open the Stylist window in one of three ways:

Figure 9.10
The Stylist icon on the Format toolbar opens the Paragraph Styles window.

Note - Depending on your keyboard mapping for X and your window manager or desktop configuration, pressing F11 might not open the Paragraph Styles window.


In any case, the Paragraph Styles window opens (see Figure 9.11).

Figure 9.11
The Paragraph Styles window lists available styles.

Applying a Style

When you have the Paragraph Styles window open, you can apply a named style to any text in your document. You'll learn more about creating styles in the next section, but first here's a look at how to apply a style.

The styles and text in this example won't match your document, but you can still see how styles are used. Follow these steps:

1. Place your cursor in a paragraph of text to which you want to apply a new style.

2. Double-click on a style name in the Paragraph Styles window. Notice that several things might change in your text paragraph, depending on which style you double-clicked on. The indents or margins, the font, the size, or other features might all have changed.

3. Try double-clicking on another style and watch the text change.

4. With the Paragraph Styles window still open, click on another paragraph in your document to move the cursor to that document.

5. Double-click on any style and watch the text paragraph change.

That's how easy it is to use a style to format your document. In the next section, you learn more about how to use the Paragraph Styles window with styles that are predefined, or with styles that you define.

Reviewing the Stylist

The Stylist window is a quick-access method of applying a named style to a block of text. You can also choose a style from the drop-down list in the Object toolbar (see Figure 9.12), but other things can be done only in the Stylist window.

Figure 9.12
The drop-down list of styles in the Object toolbar enables you to apply a style to text.

Note - The drop-down list of styles on the Object toolbar includes only styles that are already applied to at least one paragraph in your document. You'll want to use the Stylist window for initial document formatting.


Notice the eight icons across the top of the Stylist window. The five icons on the top-left determine which type of styles are displayed in the Stylist. (See Figure 9.13.)

Figure 9.13
These five icons in the Stylist window determine which type of styles are listed in the window.

Because formatting can apply to different areas, Styles can also be applied at different levels. The five icons represent the following:

Tip - The examples in this hour revolve around paragraph styles, but the same principles apply to the other types listed in the Stylist window.


You will use some other parts of the Stylist window in the examples that follow.

Reviewing the Attributes of a Style

Using a style is only half the fun. If you want to understand how your document is formatted and be ready to create your own styles (discussed in the next section), you need to see what formatting attributes are part of a named style.

To see the parts of a named style, view that style in the Paragraph Style dialog box. Use one of the following options:

Using either method, the Paragraph Style dialog box appears (shown in Figure 9.14).

Figure 9.14
The Paragraph Style dialog box shows the many attributes that are set for a named paragraph style.

The attributes that you can review in this dialog box are as follows:

Explore these tabs to see what settings are in effect for the paragraph style you selected. In the next section, you learn two ways to quickly create your own named style in addition to the ones listed by default in the Stylist window.

Sams Teach Yourself StarOffice® 5 for Linux in 24 Hours

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Hour 9: Using Advanced Formatting Tools

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