Getting Started Guide

What is a template?
A template is a 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 OpenOffice.org (OOo) 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, OOo uses the blank template for that type of document that is
installed with OOo. See “Setting a default template” on page 70 for more information.
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 OpenOffice.org 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 73.
OpenOffice.org 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 wrapping
type, borders, backgrounds, and columns.
56 Getting Started with OpenOffice.org 3.3