Seasoned Microsoft Office users may be familiar with both templates and styles; in Office, they’re a key to increased productivity. However, many Office users never touch them. In OOo, styles and templates are even more important than in Office, and wise users will become familiar with both the concepts and the details of using them.

What is a style?
A style is a group of formatting characteristics gathered together and given a name. Styles offer a number of advantages. First, they make it easy to apply the same formatting to different parts of a document; just use the same style. Second, they make it easy to change formatting uniformly; change the formatting of the style and everything using that style changes. Finally, because you can save styles in templates (discussed later in this chapter), it’s easy to use the same formatting across a whole family of documents.

For example, you may decide to write a document using 10-point Arial for the text and 14-point Arial for headings. If you later decide to change to Times New Roman, with styles, you make the change in two places—the definitions of your body text and heading styles. Without styles, you have to go through and change each paragraph.

OpenOffice.org offers a variety of style types, varying with the application. Table 1 shows the types of styles available in the various applications.

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