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Using Styles Versus Using Formatting Buttons and
Menu Options
Using styles rather than the Format menu options and buttons helps give your pages,
paragraphs, texts, and lists a more consistent look and makes it easier to change your
formatting. For example, if you emphasize text by selecting it and clicking the Bold
button, then later decide you want emphasized text to be italicized, you need to find all
of your bolded text and manually change it to italics. If you use a character style, you
only need to change the style from bold to italics and all text that has been formatted
with that style automatically changes from bold to italics.
Text formatted with a menu option or button overrides any styles you have applied. If
you use the Bold button to format some text and an emphasis style to format other text,
then changing the style does not change the text that you formatted with the button,
even if you later apply the style to the text you bolded with the button. You must man-
ually unbold the text and then apply the style.
Likewise, if you manually format your paragraphs using Format > Paragraph, it is
easy to end up with inconsistent paragraph formatting. This is especially true if you
copy and paste paragraphs from other documents with different formatting.
Changing a Style
With styles, you can change formatting throughout a document by changing a style,
rather than applying the change separately everywhere you want to apply the new for-
matting.
1 In the Styles and Formatting window, right-click the style you want to change.
2 Click Modify.
3 Change the settings for the selected style.
4 Click OK.
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GNOME User Guide
For information about the available settings, refer to the OpenOffice.org online
help.
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