OpenOffice.org Help TNT: Tips'n'Tricks that somehow didn't make it to the help (yet).

A: Look here, darling, I've got something to tell you right now, and it is of highest priority.

B: You make me curious. Continue.

A: I've found some reasons to feel some affection towards you.

B: Can you be more precise in this statement, please?

A: I've found four reasons to feel an affection towards you increased up to 100 percent.

B: Go ahead ...

A: These are the reasons, in order from top to bottom:

1. You look so beautiful.
2. You give me reason to live.
3. I get excited when I think of you.
4. We can exchange more than words.

B: This is a numbered list, shouldn't it be a bullet list?

A: You're right as always, darling. I love the way you edit my words right out of my mouth.

B: Thank you for saying that. Al least you got the punctuation right. But you could have read the Sun Editorial Style Guide, Chapter 3, and follow that advice.

A: You're welcome, darling - better I wake up now.

This can happen to a tech writer when mixing up the following:

• reviewing a newly written Sun book all day long
• reading High Fidelity by Nick Hornby late at night
• trying to live a personal life, as much as possible, if possible at all

All page properties for Writer text documents, for example the page orientation, are defined by page styles. By default, a new Writer text document uses the Default page style for all pages. If you open an existing text document, different page styles may have been applied to the different pages.

It is important to know that changes that you apply to a page property will only affect the pages that use the current page style. The current page style is listed in the Status Bar at the lower window border.

To change the page orientation for all pages

If your text document consists only of pages with the same page style, you can change the page properties directly:

1. Choose Format - Page.

2. Click the Page tab.

3. Under Paper format, select Portrait or Landscape.

4. Click OK.

To change the page orientation only for some pages

OpenOffice.org uses page styles to specify the orientation of the pages in a document. Page styles define more page properties, as for example header and footer or page margins. You can either change the Default page style for the current document, or you can define own page styles and apply those page styles to any parts of your text.

At the end of this help page, we'll discuss the scope of page styles in detail. If you are unsure about the page style concept, please read the section at the end of this page.

Note: Unlike character styles or paragraph styles, the page styles don't know a hierarchy. You can create a new page style based on the properties of an existing page style, but when you later change the source style, the new page style does not automatically inherit the changes.

To change the page orientation for all pages that share the same page style, you first need a page style, then apply that style:

1. Choose Format - Styles and Formatting.

2. Click the Page Styles icon.

3. Right-click a page style and choose New. The new page style initially gets all properties of the selected page style.

4. On the Organizer tab page, type a name for the page style in the Name box, for example "My Landscape".

5. In the Next Style box, select the page style that you want to apply to the next page that follows a page with the new style. See the section about the scope of page styles at the end of this help page.

6. Click the Page tab.

7. Under Paper format, select Portrait or Landscape.

8. Click OK.

Now you have defined a proper page style with the name "My Landscape". To apply the new style, double-click the "My Landscape" page style in the Styles and Formatting window. All pages in the current scope of page styles will be changed. If you defined the "next style" to be a different style, only the first page of the current scope of page styles will be changed.

The scope of page styles

You should be aware of the scope of page styles in OpenOffice.org. Which pages of your text document get affected by editing a page style?

One page long styles

A page style can be defined to span one page only. The First Page style is an example. You set this property by defining another page style to be the "next style", on the Format - Page - Organizer tab page.

A one page long style starts from the lower border of the current page style range up to the next page break. The next page break appears automatically when the text flows to the next page, which is sometimes called a "soft page break". Alternatively, you can insert a manual page break.

• To insert a manual page break at the cursor position, press Ctrl+Enter or choose Insert - Manual Break and just click OK.

Manually defined range of a page style

The Default page style does not set a different "next style" on the Format - Page - Organizer tab page. Instead, the "next style" is set also to be Default. All page styles that are followed by the same page style can span multiple pages. The lower and upper borders of the page style range are defined by "page breaks with style". All the pages between any two "page breaks with style" use the same page style.

You can insert a "page break with style" directly at the cursor position. Alternatively, you can apply the "page break with style" property to a paragraph or to a paragraph style.

Perform any one of the following commands:

• To insert a "page break with style" at the cursor position, choose Insert - Manual Break, select a Style name from the listbox, and click OK.

• To apply the "page break with style" property to the current paragraph, choose Format - Paragraph - Text Flow. In the Breaks area, activate Enable and With Page Style. Select a page style name from the listbox.

• To apply the "page break with style" property to the current paragraph style, right-click the current paragraph. Choose Edit Paragraph Style from the context menu. Click the Text Flow tab. In the Breaks area, activate Enable and With Page Style. Select a page style name from the listbox.

• To apply the "page break with style" property to an arbitrary paragraph style, choose Format - Styles and Formatting. Click the Paragraph Styles icon. Right-click the name of the paragraph style you want to modify and choose Modify. Click the Text Flow tab. In the Breaks area, activate Enable and With Page Style. Select a page style name from the listbox.

Several methods are available to copy cell styles and page styles from one Calc spreadsheet to another file.

Copying cell styles

You found a document called "StylesApplied.ods" somewhere, and you like the styles that are used to format the cells. You want to apply the same nice cell styles in your own spreadsheet. You know that once the styles show up in the "Styles and Formatting" window, you can easily apply a style to the selected cells by double-clicking the style name.

An easy method is to copy the formatted cells from the source document into your document. For example, use drag-and-drop to copy the cells. This copies the cell styles, too. You can now apply the copied cell styles to the other cells in your spreadsheet, and then delete the cells that you did copy.

Copying cell and page styles

To copy any type of styles you can use any of the following methods:

Creating a new document

If you start with a new document, it is best to use the source document with all those nice styles as a template. Then you can start new documents based on that template whenever you want.

1. Open the source document which contains the styles.

2. Save the document as a template:

   Choose File - Templates - Save. You see the Templates dialog, where you can enter a name for the template and select a category. (Note that the picture shows the Templates dialog of StarOffice 8 on Solaris)
   

   
   

3. In this example, you enter the name "myCalcStyles" and click OK. This saves the document as a template with the name "myCalcStyles.ots" to your OOo user/template directory.

To start a new document based on this template, open the Templates and Documents dialog:

1. Choose File - New - Templates and Documents.

2. Click the Templates icon at the left, then double-click the My Templates category.

   
   

3. Double-click the "myCalcStyles" template.

   A new Calc spreadsheet opens. It is based on the template, contains the styles you want, and has an "untitled" name like all new documents.

Copying styles to an existing document

You can use drag-and-drop in the Template Organizer to copy or move styles between any two documents or templates of the same document type.

1. Open both documents - the source and the destination document.

2. Choose File - Templates - Organize to open the Template Management dialog.

3. Click the drop-down list at the lower left (where you see "Templates"), and select "Documents".

   
   

4. In one of the two list boxes, double-click the source file. If you want, you can double-click the destination file in the other list box to see its style contents, although this is not mandatory.

5. Double-click the Styles entry to open a list of all styles in that file.

6. Drag-and-drop the style you want to copy to the destination file name in the other list. Be sure to hold down the Ctrl key to copy the style. You see a plus sign at the mouse pointer. Without the Ctrl key you would move the style from one file to the other.

7. After copying all styles, click Close and save your destination document.

You can only copy or move styles between the same type of documents. Calc styles can only be copied to Calc documents or Calc templates, Writer styles only to other Writer files.