Operation Manual

What is a template?
A template is a document model that you use to create other documents. For example, you can
create a template for business reports that has your company’s logo on the first page. New
documents created from this template will all have your company’s logo on the first page.
Templates can contain anything that regular documents can contain, such as text, graphics, a set
of styles, and user-specific setup information such as measurement units, language, the default
printer, and toolbar and menu customization.
All documents in LibreOffice are based on templates. You can create a specific template for any
document type (text, spreadsheet, drawing, presentation). If you do not specify a template when
you start a new document, then the document is based on the default template for that type of
document. If you have not specified a default template, LibreOffice uses the blank template for that
type of document that is installed with LibreOffice. See “Setting a default template” on page 74 for
more information.
LibreOffice 4.0 supplies one user-selectable text template, MediaWiki, as an alternative to the
default in documents (Writer). Note that German is the default document language in the
MediaWiki template. This can be changed on the Languages page in Tools > Options >
Language Settings.
Ten colored backgrounds are supplied for presentations (Impress). No alternative templates are
supplied for drawings (Draw) or spreadsheets (Calc).
What are styles?
A style is a set of formats that you can apply to selected pages, text, frames, and other elements in
your document to quickly change their appearance. When you apply a style, you apply a whole
group of formats at the same time.
Many people manually format paragraphs, words, tables, page layouts, and other parts of their
documents without paying any attention to styles. They are used to writing documents according to
physical attributes. For example, you might specify the font family, font size, and any formatting
such as bold or italic.
Styles are logical attributes. Using styles means that you stop saying “font size 14pt, Times New
Roman, bold, centered”, and you start saying “Title” because you have defined the “Title” style to
have those characteristics. In other words, styles means that you shift the emphasis from what the
text (or page, or other element) looks like, to what the text is.
Styles help improve consistency in a document. They also make major formatting changes easy.
For example, you may decide to change the indentation of all paragraphs, or change the font of all
titles. For a long document, this simple task can be prohibitive. Styles make the task easy.
In addition, styles are used by LibreOffice for many processes, even if you are not aware of them.
For example, Writer relies on heading styles (or other styles you specify) when it compiles a table
of contents. Some common examples of style use are given in “Examples of style use” on page 77.
LibreOffice supports the following types of styles:
• Page styles include margins, headers and footers, borders and backgrounds. In Calc, page
styles also include the sequence for printing sheets.
• Paragraph styles control all aspects of a paragraph’s appearance, such as text alignment,
tab stops, line spacing, and borders, and can include character formatting.
• Character styles affect selected text within a paragraph, such as the font and size of text, or
bold and italic formats.
60 | Getting Started with LibreOffice 4.0