Writer Guide

Modifying styles
Writer provides several predefined styles, but you may find that they
do not fit in one way or another your preferences. You can build your
own library of custom styles to use in place of the predefined ones, or
you can modify the existing styles. OOo offers four mechanisms to
modify both both predefined and custom (user-created) styles:
• Update a style from a selection.
• Load or copy styles from another document or template.
• Change a style using the Style dialog box.
• Use AutoUpdate (paragraph and frame styles only).
The first two methods are discussed in “Update Style (from a
selection)” on page 189 and “Load Styles (from a template or
document)” on page 190, while Chapter 7 (Working with Styles)
discusses at length the process of creating a new style.
This section shows how you can quickly make simple modifications to
existing paragraph styles using the same tools you would use for
applying formatting manually.
Tip
Any changes made to a style are effective only in the current
document. If you want to reuse modified or new styles in other
documents, you need to either save the styles in a template—
see Chapter 10 (Working with Templates)—or copy the styles
into the other documents, as described in “Copying and
moving styles” on page 209.
Changing a style using the Style dialog box
To change an existing style using the Style dialog box, right-click on
the style in the Styles and Formatting window and select Modify from
the pop-up menu.
The dialog box displayed depends on the type of style selected. Figure
181 shows an example of the dialog box for a paragraph style. Each
style’s dialog box has several tabs. The various properties on these
dialog boxes are described in the next chapter.
Move to the page where the setting you want to modify is specified and
input the new value. You can click the Help button at any time to bring
up the online guide where all the options of the current page are
briefly described. When you are done, click OK to close the dialog box.
As discussed above, the great advantage of styles is that all the
200 OpenOffice.org 3 Writer Guide