Styles are the basic bricks for document entry automation. They define properties for text. With a well designed styles collection, manual formatting, or even style switching, is reduced to a minimum.
In LO, there are three styles layers:
- Paragraph style: global properties for text in this paragraph; define one style per paragraph goal (e.g. main text, comment, footnote, headings, signature, …)
- Character style (this layer does not exist in M$ Word): allows to apply extra properties or fully replace them to a selection within a paragraph (e.g.
- Direct formatting: manually applied properties without style definition, usually creates a mess among the names para/char styles and the only way to get rid of it is through
Format
→ Clear direct formatting
The layers are overridden in the given order: direct overrides character which overrides paragraph.
Paragraph styles are best defined with their intent in mind (just like “semantic” mark-up in HTML5). For a letter, you might have Date, “Addressee”, “Object”, “References”, various “Heading x”, “Body Text”, “Valediction”, “Signature”.
Character styles are either defined for their visual effects (such as “Italics”, “Bold”, …) which is enough for letters, or for semantic highlighting which is more frequent in technical writing (such as “Technical term”, “Foreign word”, “Important”, “Minor”, …).
An important aspect of styles is the ability to link them: a style may be a descendant of another one and inherits all the father’s properties, except for a few of them which are overridden. When the father style is modified, the modifications cascade down the hierarchy unless the changed property was overridden. With such a hierarchical organisation, styling and formatting always remain consistent.
The automation part lies in the relation between paragraph styles. A given style may be defined to be followed by another style. With a clever design, a letter may begin with a “Date” style and the styles will automatically switch to “Addressee”, “Object”, “Attachment”, “Civility” and “Body Text”. Then you type as many “Body Text” you need and you manually switch to “Valediction” which may automatically followed by “Signature”. Grand total: only an initial style setting and a manual style switch.
Since paragraph styles have a property to define the space above and below the paragraph, you should never type empty paragraph only to create spacing between them. There is more flexibility in the definition and possibilities to experiment a global layout through style modification (see below the remark about inheritance between styles).
One of my favourite is to separate styles into two families: headings, depending on Heading with a sans serif font and a colour, and text styles, depending on “Body Text” (inheriting also from “Default”) with a serif font. I built a complete family of styles which I repeatedly use.
The family can be stored:
- either in a previous file and the styles are loaded through
Format
→ Styles & Formatting
or F11
, then clicking on the rightmost icon in the toolbar and selecting Load styles to load them from the previous file (and you can choose whether you want all styles or only para, char, …),
- or in a personal template, but this is a bit more complicated (though not that much) if you are new to LO.
There are also styles for pages (margins, columns, orientation, header and footer, …), frames, i.e. containers for inserted objects like tables, pictures, formulas, …, and numbering. A numbering definition may be attached to any paragraph style but is preferentially aimed at lists (numbered or bulleted).
Note also that, contrary to M$ Word, heading styles are not limited to Heading x, any style may be part of document outline (its headings) provided a property is checked in its definition.
If you think this clarifies the style concept or this correctly addresses you question, please tick the answer for community benefit.