Working with styles needs a new mind set. Those brought up in the typewriter age often seem to have something of a mental block. Paragraph styles are an alternative means of managing layout with less effort and more consistency than is possible with a typewriter.

Definitions

• Style The style of a paragraph is the formatting details (including font attributes [name, size, colour,...], spacing, indents...). These details can be stored as a named style (eg Large italics). When Large italics is selected for a paragraph, the paragraph is formatted accordingly, guaranteeing consistency.
• Template To standardise formats across several documents, text and styles can be stored in a template (eg My letter heading). Basing new letters on the My letter heading template makes the look and feel of all your letters the same.

Using styles rather than applying specific formatting to paragraphs is a great time-saver, ensuring a manuscript is consistently formatted and allowing easy changes to layout. For more, see paragraph styles

See also getting started with Writer