91 About Impress Styles

Styles enable you to format text or graphics on your presentation's slides using a predefined format. By reusing styles, you reduce the amount of work you have to do to create and format a slide and to make your existing slides look the way you want them to look.

Before You Begin

89 Format Presentation Text

See Also

92 Use a Style

The terminology of styles is similar across all the OpenOffice.org products. Impress, however, uses styles in a more limited manner. With Writer, for example, you can select a word, sentence , or paragraph and select a new style from the Style dialog box to apply to that text. As soon as you do, the text takes on all the formatting that the style defines.

Impress limits your use of styles in the following ways:

• You must use styles applicable to slides you create with an AutoLayout. In other words, if you insert a blank, empty slide into your presentation, you will not be able to apply any styles to that slide. Instead, you must format the slide using the format menu without the use of styles. If you insert a new slide using one of the AutoLayout formats, such as the Title and Text AutoFormat slide, the presentation styles defined by that AutoFormat are available to you.

  NOTE

  

  16 About Styles and Templates describes how to use styles in Writer documents. If you need to review terminology, you can review that task because the terminology is the same whether you're applying styles to Impress slides or to Writer documents.

  
  

• You can only modify a style by changing one of the AutoFormat element's format and then changing the style. All existing slides that use that style, and all slides you add in the future to that presentation, use that modified style. In other words, if you add an AutoLayout slide with a title, as shown in the following figure, and you change the title's style, if you add a similar slide later, the new slide's title will take on the modified style, too.

You can easily control your presentation's overall set of styles.

When you insert a new slide, you'll select an AutoLayout form that most closely matches the slide you want to insert. All styles for that AutoLayout are then available to you when you press F11 or select Format, Styles, Catalog from the menu.