Episode: 1325
Title: HPR1325: LibreOffice 10 Writer Paragraph Styles in Templates
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1325/hpr1325.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-17 23:34:54

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Hello, this is Ahuka, welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio and to another in our ongoing
series.
Looking at Libra Office, in this case we're still on Libra Office writer, we're going to
be there for a while, there's a lot to cover.
What I want to do now is add in another little piece of the puzzle, so to speak.
We spent a lot of time talking about paragraph-level styles.
So we talked about creating a specific style for paragraphs that would have the indent and
everything built into it.
We took a look at other paragraph-level styles, like headings.
We took a look at tabs, which is another useful paragraph-level style.
And then last time we took a look at how you can create a workflow around using these things
day in and day out, and all of that was useful.
We even looked at how you can change styles in a document and stuff like that.
But what I want to do now is I want to come back to this idea that styles are objects that
live inside of templates.
So what happens if you have a style you'd like to use that you've already developed,
it's in another template?
You got a couple of options, okay?
Depending on how many styles you need and where they are now and all of that.
So let's say you have an existing template and you want to just change one or two styles
in it.
Well, open the template and save it with a new name.
You've got a new template and you can go through and change those few styles.
So that's one way you can do it.
Sometimes though, you want to just grab a few styles.
In fact, if you think about it, suppose someone sends you a document and they've created
some styles that you think, oh, that would be handy, I would like to have that.
Well, you can actually grab those using what's called the template organizer.
Now that's what's called in LibreOffice.
I think it's also called organizer in Microsoft Word.
Again, this is a pretty general concept, but if you're using a different word processing
package, you might need to do a little bit of research to see what do they call it and
where do they put it.
So I'm doing it with LibreOffice writer.
So if I go to the file menu and go down to templates, I select Organize and that's going
to bring up the organizer window, all right?
Now, earlier we went there because what we wanted to do was create a default template.
So we could go into the template organizer, go into, you know, double click my templates
to open it up, find the one that we had created, give the command set as default, et cetera.
So if you're unclear about that, you go back to the earlier one on the default template.
So I'm just saying this is the same window.
But there's actually two panes.
It's like a three column window, pane one, pane two, and then buttons with commands and
options on them.
So if you look underneath these, you would see that the first pane generally says templates
and the second one says documents.
Now we use that before to say, ah, well, let's open up my templates.
We find what's in there and then we would see a specific template and we could click
on that and do something.
Now what if you have two templates that you want to move stuff around, okay?
So go to the second column and change that dropdown from saying documents to saying templates.
And so now you can select two different templates, one in the left pane, one in the right
pane, okay, then you double click on one of the type like my templates, you double click
that to open it, okay?
And then in the other column, select the template you want to copy the style from and
double click it to expand it.
By the way, if you want to copy a style from a document, double click the document to
do it works either way.
But now here's the thing we didn't do before.
In your default template, double click that and what will you see?
You'll see a list of the styles that you've put in there, all right?
Then you've created as a style or modified as a style is going to be there.
So when I said before that templates are containers that hold styles, I really didn't
mean it.
And when you get here, you can see what that is.
So all the styles that you have in the template are going to be there.
Find the one that you want to copy.
Click on hold down the control key and drag it to the other template.
Now I say hold down the control key, this is important.
If you don't do that, you won't copy it, you'll actually move it.
And if you know anything about computers, copy and move are two separate things.
When you move an item from one place to another, it's not in the first place any longer.
So if I move a style from one template to another, the template that used to have it
doesn't have it anymore.
That could be a bad thing, generally is.
So by holding down the control key while I drag it, I'm forcing it to copy rather than
move.
So that's just a little thing you want to be aware of, very important.
So always hold down the control key.
Now for a document, same thing.
Have one of the pains say document and the other say template, double click the template
to open it, double click the document and open that up, find the styles you want, hold
down the control key, click and drag.
So if you can copy styles into a template or into another document, however you want
to do it.
So that's how the template organizer works for copying styles.
And that's a very useful thing to understand.
Now there is another approach that you can take.
It's a little bit trickier.
And that is to assign a whole different template to a document.
You may have based the document on your default template.
Now you say, actually I wish I had used a different template.
There is a way to do that, but we need to talk a little bit about extensions.
And we'll probably go into more detail later.
But as you probably know with, if you have Firefox, you know, Firefox has all sorts of extensions
and plugins and add-ins that you can put in.
Google Chrome now has all sorts of plugins and add-ons and what have you.
Libra Office is also built around the idea of extensions, okay?
That means you can add capabilities that we're not there in the out-of-the-box experience
with Libra Office.
You can add some of that capability by putting in an extension.
And there is an extensions site.
I will, it's called extensions.libraoffice.org.
I'll make sure I put that in the show notes.
And what you want to do is make sure that any extension you download has the .oxt file
extension.
Some of them don't, and you won't get anywhere.
Because Libra Office won't know what to do with it if it doesn't see that file extension.
So let's say it does, you've got the file extension .oxt or if it didn't have that, you've
added it, then in Libra Office, go to Tools, Extensions, and Add it.
Now at this point, you need to close Libra Office writer and then reopen it, all right?
So if you've got this extension that we call the Template Changer, which you can get from
the Libra Office extension site, when you go there, you're going to go to File Templates,
same thing we've done before.
You're not going to see two more options.
One is Assign Template Current Document, and the other is Assign Template Folder.
The first option, Assign Template Current Document, lets you choose a template to assign
to your document.
When you choose this, you will get a window that has all of your templates, and you can
choose which one to assign.
Now the second option will let you assign a template to an entire folder in one operation.
This can be very useful if you have documents from multiple authors that need to have a uniform
appearance.
In fact, let's take back to the thing I was talking about last time, where I had 40 or
50 different departments sending me submissions for the college catalog.
This could be a technique to say I'm going to assign one template to all of these things.
Now, of course, I ended up just merging them in a one big document anyway.
But if you want to create some uniformity, that can be a very good way to do it.
So what we have looked at here are summing up various paragraph styles.
There's a lot more paragraph styles than what we talked about.
This is just really enough to get you going on the topic.
We looked at how to create them.
We created a paragraph style.
We looked at how to use headings logically.
We looked at how to create tabs with dot leaders.
We looked at how we can put that together into a workflow and how you work with it on
a day by day basis, assigning styles to different objects, changing styles, and all of that.
And now we've looked at how we can move these styles around within the templates.
We've accomplished rather a lot.
Now, one of the things you want to bear in mind is that this was only the first of five
style tabs.
The very first one said paragraph.
Now, to be sure, there are more paragraph styles than anything else in Libra Office Writer.
So that is the biggest selection.
But there are others, and we want to talk about those too.
So that's coming up.
A couple of them have to do with document page layout.
You may take a, I haven't quite figured out how I want to handle that yet.
I may take a side road before coming back.
But this is, for the moment, all I'm going to do on paragraph styles.
And we're going to start moving on to some of the others.
And I think the next one we're going to talk about is character styles.
And that's something that you may not have thought about very much.
But I hope when I'm done, you will think more about it.
For the time being, this is Huka.
I'm signing off, and I'm reminding all of you, please support Free Software.
Thank you.
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