Creating custom styles

Using them, Making them, Finding them
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AustinJoe
Posts: 1
Joined: Wed Nov 27, 2013 6:18 am

Creating custom styles

Post by AustinJoe »

Howdy OpenOffice community,

I'm new, and hoping OpenOffice will help me wean off of MS tools. I have a number of templates I use frequently with Word, and I was copying them into Writer and saving them as templates. So far all is well. In one of the templates, I have some custom bullets. To wit,

App:
Prin:

The first, oddly enough, is named Applications, and it follows another custom style named Division. The template starts with some non-styled lines, then a Division. The style following Division is Application, and after Application is Principle.

My problem is that I can't see how to do this in Writer. If this is possible, please write and tell me how.

Many thanks,
AustinJoe
OpenOffice 4.0.1 Mac OSX 10.9
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Hagar Delest
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Re: Creating custom styles

Post by Hagar Delest »

Hi and welcome to the forum!

Can you upload a sample file? Your description is not that clear (see How to attach a document here).
LibreOffice 7.6.2.1 on Xubuntu 23.10 and 7.6.4.1 portable on Windows 10
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acknak
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Re: Creating custom styles

Post by acknak »

From what I hear, OO Writer styles are completely different from MS Word styles--but I don't know any details of it. You can certainly chain together a sequence of styles in Writer, if that's what you're after.

Maybe someone who knows Word better will help out.
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Hagar Delest
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Re: Creating custom styles

Post by Hagar Delest »

If you have bunches of text with a specific formatting, I think it would be easier to make a dummy set of paragraphs formatted as you want and make that an AutoText.
Nesting paragraph styles and lists may be complicated.
LibreOffice 7.6.2.1 on Xubuntu 23.10 and 7.6.4.1 portable on Windows 10
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acknak
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Re: Creating custom styles

Post by acknak »

Oh, right. I have heard that one big difference is that Word styles can provide content; Writer styles cannot--they're strictly formatting.

If you need boiler-plate content, formatted or not, use Writer's autotext feature: select the text, then Edit > Autotext ... Autotext > New

I'm sure there's a section somewhere in the Writer Guide for this: http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wik ... ser_Guides
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Bill
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Re: Creating custom styles

Post by Bill »

AustinJoe wrote:Howdy OpenOffice community,

I'm new, and hoping OpenOffice will help me wean off of MS tools. I have a number of templates I use frequently with Word, and I was copying them into Writer and saving them as templates. So far all is well. In one of the templates, I have some custom bullets. To wit,

App:
Prin:

The first, oddly enough, is named Applications, and it follows another custom style named Division. The template starts with some non-styled lines, then a Division. The style following Division is Application, and after Application is Principle.

My problem is that I can't see how to do this in Writer. If this is possible, please write and tell me how.

Many thanks,
AustinJoe
In Writer, you have to create a numbering style that provides the text, then create a paragraph style and apply the numbering style to the paragraph style.

For the "App:" line, create a new numbering style, "App". On the numbering style dialog, select the Options tab. Set the Numbering to "None" and Before to "App: ". Close the numbering style dialog and create a new paragraph style, "Application". On the Paragraph Style dialog, select the Outline & Numbering tab. In the Numbering Style box, select the App numbering style. Now select the Organizer tab. In the Next Style box, you can select the paragraph style that will be applied automatically to the next paragraph.
AOO 4.1.14 on Ubuntu MATE 22.04
jcjar
Posts: 1
Joined: Sun Dec 07, 2014 10:28 pm

Q & A

Post by jcjar »

Bill, a similar question, I'm using 3.3.0 on Vista 64bit. I want to alternate between these buttons/macros or whatever:
Q:
A:
Obviously these refer to Question, then Answer, and should alternate Q, A, Q, A, etc. I tried the instructions above but did not find a "Q" numbering style. A friend got this working quickly with the MS platform but when opening in AOO, the buttons he had alternately assigned as "Q" and "A" were not available.
Thanks for any help you may be.
JC
OpenOffice 3.3.0 on Windows Vista 64
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