The first step is to understand the differences between FM and LO Writer. Start by reading the Writer Guide. It is not written to explain the founding principles but will give you some ideas.
Next practice on short 1- or 2-page throw-away documents to get accustomed to UI and effects of commands.
Schematically, Writer is built around the notion of style. A style is a collection of paramaters you can apply as a whole on an “object”. Such an object can be:
- a paragraph
You control its “geometry” (spacing above and below, left and right indents, first line indent, background, foreground highlighting, alignment, tab stops, text flow, borders and a default character style.
- a word (more generally a run of consecutive characters, thus the name of character style)
You define the font properties (face, size, variant), visual effects (colour, decoration, casing), position (for sub- and superscript, character spacing and kerning), highlighting and borders.
- a frame (a rectangular area external to the main flow which may contain secondary text, image, drawing, …)
You control anchor (how it is related to main text flow), size, wrap mode (how main text flows around it), background, number of columns (relevant for text frames) and borders. Anchor is an important parameter because it tells how the frame moves when you edit your document (how it follows its reference point when the latter moves due to text reflow).
- a page
You control its “geometry” (size, orientation, margins), background, activation of header/footer and their size, number of columns, footnote area geometry and borders.
- a list item number of bullet (this category is rather difficult to explain because it does not apply to a “primary” object but to a “decoration” of a paragraph)
All lists in Writer are multi-level. With a list style, you specify for each level the kind of number or bullet and its indentation.
When the same attribute is specified in more than one category (this happens in principle only between character and paragraph styles because the latter contains a default char style), the precedence rule states that you consider, in order, paragraph style, which is overridden by character style, itself overridden by manual formatting.
For ease of formatting maintenance and peace of mind (to avoid “surprising” but predictable results destabilising newbies), avoid direct formatting. Due to the precedence rule, it always has priority over styles (and this is good to handle elegantly exceptions to your general formatting, but avoid it as much as possible) and this nullifies the benefits of styles.
My experience with FrameMaker is too rudimentary and too old for me to remember the workflow. I think the principles are radically different. My advice would be to paste your FM contents as unformatted text into a blank new document and apply styles over it. This is tedious; consequently, do it only if you must edit and review your existing documents.
If you have collections of similar looking documents, creating templates can be worth it. A Writer template file (extension .ott) contains your preferred collection of styles and optionally initial contents for new documents. When you create a new document from a template, the new document inherits initial contents, of course, and all styles which spares you the task of configuring them again. Also, if you later modify your styles in the template, these changes will be automatically forwarded to the derived document when you open it.
