Operation Manual

What is a template?
A template is a model document 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.
Since LibreOffice version 4.4, you can create templates for Master Documents as well as for
ordinary documents.
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. Often applying a style means applying 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, using 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 require making individual changes in dozens of
places. By contrast, when you use styles, you only need to make a single change.
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.
• Frame styles are used to format graphic and text frames, including text wrap, borders,
backgrounds, and columns.
• List styles allow you to select, format, and position numbers or bullets in lists.
62 | Getting Started with LibreOffice 5.0