101. About Writer Styles

When you are working with a document that requires that you use the same set of character or paragraph formatting attributes on text throughout the document, you will want to take advantage of styles. A style is a grouping of formatting attributes identified by a style name.

Key Term

Style A collection of formatting attributes that have been saved under a style name.

For example, you may be formatting a number of headings that use the same font size, color, and alignment (perhaps all the headings are centered). You can create a style (a paragraph style) that contains these formatting elements and then assign it to your various headings as needed.

Writer styles are cataloged and assigned using the Stylist. The Stylist allows you to quickly switch between style types and add new styles as needed. So, you can take advantage of a number of premade styles, and you can create your own styles.

Two of the most commonly used styles are character and paragraph styles. A character style is used to assign formatting attributes to a word. For example, you might want to bold and italicize terms that show up in a document. All you have to do is click on the word and then assign the character style from the Stylist.

Key Term

Character style A collection of saved character formatting attributes used to format words in a document.

Key Term

Paragraph style A collection of both character and paragraph formatting attributes that have been saved under a style name.

Paragraph styles allow you to combine paragraph attributes, such as alignment, and character formatting attributes. You can then assign the style to an entire paragraph of text by clicking inside the paragraph and selecting the style from the Stylist.

The great thing about styles is that you can assign them as needed. And then if you decide that you don't like the way a particular style looks in the document, you can edit the style and change the formatting attributes it assigns to text. All the text that was previously assigned the style will be updated to the edited version of the style. Bottom line: Styles save you a lot of time when you are creating documents that use a lot of formatting.

Note

Writer also provides additional style types other than character and paragraph styles. There are frame styles (used for different types of frames depending on the object inside a frame), page styles (a first page style can be used to format a first page without headers and footers in the rest of the document), and numbering styles (can be used to format numbered lists with different looks).