64 About Calc Styles and Templates

Templates enable you to create a spreadsheet that has a prearranged look. Styles enable you to format a cell (or, more commonly, a range of cells ) with a predefined format. By reusing templates and styles, you reduce the amount of work you have to do to create a spreadsheet and to make your existing spreadsheets look the way you want them to look.

NOTES

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

Suppose you find yourself producing a spreadsheet of weekly payroll figures. Management requests that you format out-of-town payroll figures in a sheet different from the corporate office's payroll numbers . Each goes on its own sheet inside the same spreadsheet, although management requests that you lightly shade the background on the noncorporate payroll and use a different table format for them.

If your spreadsheet takes on the same general look each week, even though it contains two very different sheets, you can create a template that acts like a preformatted, fill-in-the-blank spreadsheet. In the future, you start with that template so you no longer have to worry with formatting the same spreadsheet each week. You also can create styles for individual sections within each sheet so you can quickly apply those styles to ranges of cells that are to take on that appearance.

TIP

Templates are more global than styles. A template is a model for a spreadsheet, and a style is a model for a cell or range of cells. Often, a template contains several cell styles that you can choose from.

A template is to an entire spreadsheet what a style is to selected cells. When creating a spreadsheet that's to look like another you often create, such as a weekly payroll report or invoices, you can start with a template that you've already set up, and you only need to fill in the details.

A template may contain several styles. When you want to use a style that's available to your current template, you can easily select that style and apply it to existing cells or cells you're about to fill in.

NOTE

In reality, you always use a template when you create new Calc spreadsheets. Calc uses a default template named Default unless you specify another template. The font, margin, and cell-formatting settings offered when you create a new spreadsheet come from this default template.

The Stylelist , available from the Format menu or by pressing F11 , is a dialog box that lists every style available in the current spreadsheet. Each style has a name . If you create a new spreadsheet using File, New, Spreadsheet , the styles in the Stylelist will display the default template's styles. If you create a new spreadsheet using a predefined template, the styles in the Stylelist dialog box come from the styles defined in that template.

The Stylelist dialog box displays the current styles available to you.

You can also see the styles available to you in a different way. You can display a catalog of styles that shows the styles in a format you may prefer over the Stylelist dialog box. Select Format, Style Catalog (or press Ctrl+F11 ) to see the Style Catalog dialog box. You can select cell styles and page styles as well as modify and easily organize the collection of styles.

The Style Catalog lists styles by style types.

NOTE

When you first install Calc, you won't find any preexisting Calc templates. OpenOffice.org comes with several templates for Writer and Impress but none for Calc. You can build your own templates and save them in the template area (see 66 Create a Calc Template ).

When you want to use a template, you'll select File, New, Templates and Documents to choose the template you want to work from.