Helpdesk Baruch College

How to Use Custom Styles in LibreOffice Writer

If you’re utilizing the complimentary and open source LibreOffice suite of programs, your word processor is probably way more effective than it requires to be. Writer has at least as lots of basic features as the paid Microsoft Word, and getting more acquainted with some of them can assist dramatically improve your workflow. Simply put, invest a little time setting things up and you’ll fly through your documents like a 60WPM Superman.

Today let’s have a look at the Styles tool, and how you can much better change it for your particular work requirements.

What Are Styles?

In Writer, a design is a collection of formatting information that you use simultaneously, quickly and easily. A Style contains any combination of the following qualities:

In other words, practically anything you can apply at the character or paragraph levels with the formatting tools one at a time, you can apply all at once by picking a Style. This is extremely beneficial if you’re creating a file that shifts regularly in between text styles, like a news release with lots of titles and citations, or a data-heavy presentation with text charts and a lot of sub-heads. It makes applying all that formatting much easier, and likewise assists keep formatting constant.

Writer comes geared up with a collection of commonly-used styles preinstalled. You can use any of them by choosing any amount of text (a word, a sentence, a paragraph), clicking the Style dropdown menu, and then selecting a design.

If you can’t see the Style drop-down menu next to the font selector above the text location, click View > > Toolbars, and make certain “Formatting (Styles)” is allowed.

To see all of the designs available at once, click the “Styles” dropdown menu, and after that click the “More Styles” option at the bottom of the list. This opens a sidebar menu that shows all of the available designs in their formatted text.

Note that various Styles are used for different functions and will affect various groups of text based on their residential or commercial properties. A character design uses formatting just to the picked characters. A paragraph design uses formatting to an entire paragraph– even if that paragraph style just includes character-level format. There are likewise specific styles for lists, frames, and pages.

Editing a Style

Let’s state you choose to stick with the default LibreOffice Styles, but you want to make a change to among them. Click the dropdown menu, click the down arrow to the right of the Style you wish to modify, and then click the “Edit Style” option.

Alternatively, you can click the “Edit Style” button (the wrench with the little blue window icon), or right-click a Style on the sidebar and after that click the “Modify” alternative.

From this menu window, you can change pretty much everything about a style. Any changes you make in any of these tabs are conserved and applied to the Style you’re dealing with. Click “OKAY” to save your changes, “Apply” to see them in action on the text file (even with no text selected!), or “Reset” to alter it back to the Writer default setting for that Style.

You can do this for any of the Styles available to you.

Making a New Style

If you ‘d rather start from scratch with your own Style, you can begin the process by either 1) clicking the “New Style” button on the menu bar (the wrench with the yellow star), right-clicking the “Styles and Formatting” sidebar and then clicking the “New” alternative, or 3) pressing Shift+F11 on your keyboard.

Provide your style a brand-new name– something that’s quickly noticeable from the names of the standard designs.

Okay, perhaps just a little bit better.

There we go. When you’re done, click the “OKAY” button

The new design appears in the list under the area of the last style you picked. Modify it in the exact same way as we discussed in the previous section.

From here, you can change anything you ‘d like among the Style format list above in the various tabs. Font changes will be used to font styles, paragraph modifications will be used to paragraphs, et cetera. When you’re done, click “OKAY” again.

There’s another method to do this, and you might prefer if it you’re more comfy working straight on your text instead of diving through the menu. Make a text selection, and after that make whatever changes you ‘d like to apply to it. For example, here’s a particular title format I like, with Lucidia Bright font style at size 18 in italics with a customized tab at.5 inches.

Now choose the text you’ve customized, then search the Styles and Formatting sidebar for the “New Style from Selection” button. It’s the little paragraph button, right here:

Click “New Style” to make a totally brand-new design that matches all the modifications you’ve made to the text, or “Update style” to use those changes to whichever design you have actually selected at the minute. (Warning: if you haven’t picked any style, this will use it to the default paragraph text design.)

Handy Shortcuts

As you get utilized to working with designs, you’ll desire a faster way to control them. Here are some faster ways you might wish to practice:

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