I would like to simulate a block quote on a text range. The text inside does not have uniform margins. I would like to increase each margin by a fixed amoount. How do I achieve that?
With the additional constraints notbto use/change styles and do nothing M$ may not understand:
- Do it manual
- Create a macro “indent here”
- Prefer to use M$-Office, because all what is not working will be blamed to LO intead of the “constraints”…
And please put the information on “work as MS needs” in future questions, to avoid others from wasting their time.
Yeah, I guess I would appreciate some help to go the macro way 
A block quote is a paragraph (or set of paragraphs) isolated from the others having a specific formatting.
With such a definition, your best option is to use a dedicated paragraph style. Built-in Quotations is a good candidate.
Style your block quote paragraphs as Quotations.
As it comes out of the box, Quotations only insets the text 1cm on both sides. You may alter the style to use italics or another font family. In case your paragraphs are multiline, you may even enable dropcaps to highlight more the quotation. The effects are only limited by your imagination and your aesthetic taste.
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Possibly the idea is to use multiple nested levels, like common in emails…
No, you do not understand. I am editing someone else’s document. There is a portion of the document that should have margins added to both sides. I cannot uniformly set the margins because the content that has blockquotes has several paragraphs of different styles. What I should do is to modify the effective style of each paragraph. No other operations on the text are permitted.
I am afraid my colleagues who use Microsoft Office will not appreciate documents containing sections.
And I guess the revised document is saved as .doc(x). In this case most of the smart changes made in Writer won’t survive the conversion back to M$O format. You’re doomed either to proceed with direct formatting (and a very tedious manual procedure) or to use Word.