Is it possible to easily remove styles in a Writer document, replacing the text with text formatted as for the style?

patbol · November 28, 2019, 8:40am

Why would I want to do this? Because I’m contributing one part of a larger document written by someone else who uses styles quite different from mine but with the same names. If I leave my styles in the section she pastes, the format changes according to her style specifications whereas if I have all text formatted as I want without applying styles, the appearance in her document will (largely) follow the formats I used, which is what I want. (We could of course coordinate our respective styles but that’s not really practical in my situation and she is using MS Office).

Any comments or suggestions would be most welcome.

Cheers, Pat.

Grantler · November 28, 2019, 8:45am

Rename your styles into unique names so that they can’t be overwritten by other styles.

keme · November 28, 2019, 10:22am

@patbol: I upvoted this, based on your request, although I consider it bad practice in most situations. It seems strange to me that you, in a collaborative context, do not agree on common settings for the styles in use, but I recognize that there may be situations where different styles makes sense.

Word does not distinguish between classes of styles, so make sure that if you use different kinds of styles (text, paragraph), you should not have the same style name in use in both places.

Note also that MS Word does not use page styles while Writer insists that different page layouts are formatted by way of page styles. This can make a mess of your document if you go back and forth a lot between Word and Writer context.

patbol · November 28, 2019, 3:35pm

Thanks Keme. I’ll try using unique file names and see how it goes. I should have thought of that. I agree this is bad practice in most situations. However, my colleague is on the other side of the world and I’m sure is “set in her ways” as for styles for the larger document. Thanks again. Cheers, Pat.

Hrbrgr · November 28, 2019, 8:53am

I think there are two ways.

You save your document (possibly a copy first) as a plain text file TXT. Paste the text from the text file into a new ODT file. Then you save again as ODT and arrange your desired styles.
In the document (possibly a copy first), mark the entire text and select Format>Delete Direct Formatting (Ctrl + M) from the menu. Set your templates.

Personally, I would prefer version 1.

I hope it helps you.