The Help claims that you can update a style from a paragraph with direct formatting: Updating Styles From Selections. That doesn’t work on my system with
Version: 7.5.5.2 (X86_64) / LibreOffice Community
Build ID: bf0ddd27f701ac1d9e0942bffe145c51e201aa5c
CPU threads: 4; OS: Linux 5.15; UI render: default; VCL: gtk3
Locale: nl-NL (nl_NL.UTF-8); UI: en-US
Calc: threaded.
See attached sandbox file. Is this a bug?
directformatting.odt (10,9 KB)
Short reply:
.
Worked on my machine in following cases:
Did not work
Version: 7.5.5.2 (X86_64) / LibreOffice Community
Build ID: 50(Build:2)
CPU threads: 4; OS: Linux 5.4; UI render: default; VCL: gtk3
Locale: de-DE (de_DE.UTF-8); UI: de-DE
Ubuntu package version: 4:7.5.5~rc2-0ubuntu0.20.04.1~lo2
Calc: threaded
@Grantler Great. Thank you. So, either the Help is incomplete, or this is a bug.
I can’t reproduce that, though.
IMHO, don’t do it. You are never sure about contents of direct formatting. You may also have character styles in the selection and I don’t know how the feature behaves in this case. You should start by checking the Organizer tab of the style though it is rather difficult to read the full configuration and modify specific settings in the various tabs. Don’t underestimate Reset to Parent as it will erase overrides in the inheritance tree, which can’t be done with Update style from selection.
I played with this because it’s easier to play with direct formatting to get a pleasing result that by playing with the settings in the style dialog box. If you can then import the result in an existing style by some mouse clicks, that’s a lot easier than modifying the style using the dialog box.
I also frequently play with direct formatting for the same purpose. But since I had bad surprises with the feature, I prefer to analyse quietly the outcome and manually update the style, be it paragraph or character. I ended up with damaged styles. So, I prefer to work on scratch documents and patch the original styles in the template.
I should probably reread carefully the documentation about the feature.
The “Updated selected style” only updates manually applied paragraph properties into the current paragraph style. Paragraph properties are these you can change in Format – Paragraph. These do not include Font settings, which is a character property.
Thank you, that solves the behavior of the update style command. However, you can define character properties in a paragraph style, while not in Format - Paragraph. So, the careless user that I am, can easily think that character properties should also be updated. The Help, after all, states that any manual formatting of the text will be included.