Writer Guide

Caution
If you are in the habit of manually overriding styles in your
document, be sure that AutoUpdate is not enabled, or you
will suddenly find whole sections of your document
reformatting unexpectedly.
• Next Style: this field is only available for paragraph and page
styles. Use it to specify which style will be applied to the next
element. It is customary, for example, to have a left page style
followed by a right page, a first page followed by a left page, a
heading followed by body text, and so on. You will see in the
example later about how this property is used. Predefined
paragraph styles for lists or bullets also make large use of the
Next Style property.
• Linked with: this field is available for paragraph, character, and
frame styles; it determines the position of the style in the
hierarchy. When creating a new style and linking it to an existing
style, all the starting properties of the style are copied from the
linked style. Refer to “Understanding linked styles” on page 223
for further information on how linked styles work.
• Category: this field is available for all style categories of styles,
and it allows you to associate the new style to one of the
categories. Note that you cannot change the category of the
predefined styles. Setting this field is useful when filtering the
contents of the Styles and Formatting window.
• Contains section: the lower part of the Organizer page shows a
summary of the properties of the style.
Understanding linked styles
When creating a new paragraph or a new
character style, you may use an existing style
as a starting point for its settings. In this sense,
OOo links the styles together. When styles are
linked, a change in the parent style affects
every style linked to it. You can easily visualize
the connections between styles by switching to
the Hierarchical view in the Styles and
Formatting window filter.
For example, every Heading style (such as
Heading 1 , Heading 2 ) is linked with a style
called Heading . This relationship is illustrated
in Figure 216.
Chapter 7 Working with Styles 223
Figure 216:
Hierarchical view of
linked styles.