Intro to OpenOffice.org Styles
- Introduction and Getting Started
- Paragraph Styles
- Working with Paragraph Styles
- Working with Page Styles
- Finishing Up
Working with Paragraph Styles
Now that the "grunt work" of this tutorial is finished, we can focus on the functional things that you can accomplish because you are using Styles. The first item we will cover is automatically adding a Table of Contents to your document.
Adding a Table of Contents
Normally, if you use a Word Processor as a glorified typewriter, creating a Table of Contents can be one of the biggest wastes of time that can be done using a Word Processor. Not only do you have to get the formatting correct, but you also must find out what is on what page number, etc. and heaven forbid you actually change anything that will move things to different pages.
Thankfully, you will now use styles to format your pages and let the software format the table and keep track of all that other stuff (such as page numbers) for you. As you probably have figured out by now when you used the Navigator, we have been using different Heading Numbers to specify the importance of each Header in relation to the others, somewhat similar to an outline. Writer will use this information to automatically format your Table of Contents.
Bringing up the Insert Index/Tables Dialog Box
So, go back to the first page of your document where the Title and Subtitle are. Now put the insertion cursor at the end of the subtitle, now click on Insert -> Indexes and Tables -> Indexes and Tables... The Insert Index/Table dialog box will appear.
Inserting Table of Contents
If you simply click on OK, a Table of Contents will be inserted that will list every heading - Titles, Articles, Sections and Amendments. For short documents, or documents with quite a few headers, such as this one, this is probably not what you want.
Detailed Table of Contents
To reduce the amount of headers included in the Table of Contents, you will want to adjust the "Evaluate up to Level" number. It defaults to 10, which would probably include any header you insert into any document. Since we only have a small document, we only want the main headers, so change this to 1 then click OK.
More Suited Smaller Table of Contents
There are quite a few other options on the "Insert Index/Table" dialog box, these will be covered in more detail in a later tutorial. Just note that if you adjust anything that moves the headers to other pages, you must also "update" the Table of Contents. To do this, simply right click on the table and select Update Index/Table. You can also update everything in the document, including the Table of Contents by selecting Tools -> Update -> Update All.
Modifying Paragraph Styles
One of the greatest strengths in creating your document to use styles is the fact that when you want to modify something with your document, such as a Chapter or Section header or simply the font of the text body, you simply modify whichever style you set for the Section and all similar objects are adjusted automatically.
Say, for instance, that you have an editor, professor or instructor that likes to change their minds on what font is used for headings or text body, or that they want the paragraph spacing to be spaced at 1.5 em instead of double spaced. If you decided not to use styles, it would take quite a bit of time to actually locate every header or select every normal paragraph just to adjust your document to fit their needs. Using styles these changes can take mere seconds and are change throughout the entire document so you don't have to worry about missing any headers/paragraphs.
To adjust paragraph styles, simply right-click on the style you want to adjust and select modify.
Modifying a Paragraph Style
This will open the style's property sheet which contains a few tabs with settings you can adjust. Go ahead and find the Heading 1 style and open the property sheet for it.
Paragraph Style Dialog Box
The tab that should be active is the Organizer tab, this tab shows the basic usage of the styles. The Name section allows you to adjust the name that the style uses. This will only work with styles that you create, not the ones available through the template that you use.
The Next Style entry allows you to change the style that gets activated when you hit return. Remember when you set the Title style, entered the title metadata then hit return, the next style was subtitle - this is where you set that functionality.
The Linked with entry allows you to set the "parent" style. For instance, by default OpenOffice.org has Heading styles 1-9, but it also has just a "Heading" style which all of the other Heading numbered styles are linked to. What this means is that if you adjust just the "Heading" style, all of the other Heading numbered styles will reflect the change (unless it specifically sets a different value for the adjustment). For example, if you want all of the Headings to use a serif font, such as Times New Roman instead of the default san-serif font Arial, then you would adjust the font within the "Heading" style and all of the "Heading #" styles would reflect the change. However, since many of the "Heading #" styles set a specific font size, an adjustment to the font size of the "Heading" style may or may not be reflected across all of the "Heading #" styles.
Finally, the AutoUpdate checkbox allows any manual change that you make to a style (such as highlighting a Heading and adjusting the font size) to be propagated to all of the other paragraphs that are of the same style. This may or may not be what you want (I never use it as I prefer to make any style adjustments using the style property sheet).
This tutorial won't cover all of the adjustments you can make to paragraph styles, but we will show you how styles will be adjusted across the entire document. So, go ahead an open the Heading 1 style (if it is not already open) and go to the "Text Flow" tab. Here we are going to specify a Page Break before every Heading 1 style, this way every section will start on a new page.
Text Flow tab of the Paragraph Style Dialog Box
What you will want do is simply click the Insert checkbox within the Breaks section, set the type to a Page Break, and set the position to "Before". Now click OK to apply the changes and your document should have all of your Heading 1 styles (Preamble, Aritcles, etc) at the start of a new page.
Updating the Table of Contents
Now that the page numbers have changed for your Table of Contents, go ahead and update the table by either right-clicking on it and select update, or use the Tools -> Update -> ... menu item.
Adjusting the Title, Subtitle and Headings
Since our first page of the Constitution looks somewhat bare, you have somewhat of a basic understanding of modifying styles, go ahead and adjust the Title and Subtitle styles to allow for extra whitespace to be added above the Title and below the subtitle. Also go ahead and change the Title style to use a serif font and increase the size if you want.
Adjusting the Title and Subtitle Paragraph Style
Now that you have a good understanding of that, go ahead and modify all of the "Headings #" styles that we have used within this document so the change is more apparent than what the default styles reflect.
Document After Adjusting the Heading Styles
Adding Whitespace to the Text Body
Some Editors, Professors or Instructors require documents to have a "Tab" at the beginning of every paragraph of the text body. Others consider this to be a drawback from the typewriter age and consider it to be unnecessary if your document has extra space between the paragraphs. Well, since this is an older document and our text body paragraphs don't have too much extra "space" between them we are going to add the extra "Tab" before each paragraph.
Indenting the first line of the Text Body Paragraphs
Doing this with styles is quite easy, simply modify the "Text body" style and specify that it use an additional .25" space on the first line, when you apply the change all of the paragraphs within the document body will have an extra "Tab" at the beginning.
