Episode: 1685
Title: HPR1685: 45 - LibreOffice Calc - Styles and Templates Introduced
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1685/hpr1685.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 07:42:20

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It's Friday 16th of January 2015. This in HP are episode 1,685 entitled, 45, Libra
Office Calc, Tile, and Template introduced, and in part on the series, Libra Office.
It is hosted by AYUKA, and in about 15 minutes long. Feedback can be sent and willnicat and
willnic.com, or by leaving a comment on this episode. The summary is, how the concept
on Tile and Template can be useful in print sheets. This episode of HP are is brought to
you by AnanasThost.com. Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15.
That's HPR15. Better web hosting that's honest and fair at AnanasThost.com.
Hello, this is AYUKA, welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio and another exciting episode
in our ongoing series on Libra Office Calc. In this particular episode, we're going to introduce
something that we've already talked about a great deal, but we talked about it in terms
of writer, in terms of word processing. Now, we're going to talk about styles and templates
in the context of spreadsheets, which you might not have thought of. Now, there's a certain
difference in that I would say when you're talking about writer or any word processor, styles and
templates are the key concept. You really cannot be considered at all proficient if you are not
making use of them. They're not quite as central in spreadsheet use. So I think one can arguably
be a reasonably proficient user without necessarily resorting to styles and templates, but they do
give you control over the appearance of your spreadsheets and can give the sheets you create
uniform appearance. So they're very useful. Particularly when we get into templates,
being able to create templates within a spreadsheet program has some uses. I hope to illustrate
some of that as we go ahead. So I'm going to hope that some of the knowledge that we created in
the writer episodes is going to carry over a bit, but let's get to some basic concepts,
okay? So first of all, a template. A template is a model that is used to create a new spreadsheet.
Calc comes with a built-in template that it uses as a default if you do not specify anything.
So what you see when you open a new spreadsheet out of the box is a copy of the default template.
You are free to keep using this, but you may wish to have a default that has settings more to
your liking. You can create a new template, save it, then set it as the default, and then if you
change your mind, you can set it back to the original default setting. The thing to keep in mind is
that templates are essentially containers. They allow you to create various settings,
apply styles, add graphics, and then have all of them appear when you create a new spreadsheet
based on the template. This is another application of the concept of objects and templates are objects
that contain other objects. Now you can find some templates online which you can download.
One source of course is LibraOffice itself. There is a template center in it's at templates.libraoffice.org
slash template-center and I've put all these links in the show notes. Another source that I found
is something called vertex42.com and they have templates, what they call templates for open
office and LibraOffice. At this point they're still pretty similar. Generally speaking, if you find
a template that works in open office, it'll work in LibraOffice. Is that going to be the same five
years from now? I don't know. I think they are gradually diverging and frankly LibraOffice is
moving ahead rapidly. I think open office is sort of languishing at this point, but we'll see what
happens. So basically if you want to build up your template library with downloads do a little
searching and you will find templates for Calc as well as other LibraOffice modules. Of course the
other option for making things work exactly the way you want is to either customize an existing
template or create one from scratch. You can do either in Calc, but just as with writer one of the
main things you would want to do with your template is to store styles. So that brings us to our
other big concept here. A style is essentially a set of formats that you apply to some element.
As we saw with writer, you can have multiple formats applied as part of a single style.
Among the choices you have are to choose a font family, a font size. You can add character formatting.
For example, the out-of-the-box setting I have on this particular machine says that when I create
a new spreadsheet, my font is aerial 10 point. That is the default style. But I could change it if I
wish to something like Euphemia 11 Bold that would be applying a style. You can do it manually,
of course, by selecting each of these settings one at a time in a new spreadsheet. But if it were a
change I wanted to make often, creating a style and saving that style in a template makes my work
much easier. Remember, if you create a style and want to use it again, it must be saved inside of
a template. Otherwise, it is lost. In Calc things are a little simpler. Instead of the five
kinds of styles we head with writer, in Calc there's only two kinds, paid styles and cell styles.
You can access them in the same way as with writer. Go to the format menu and select styles and
formatting, or you can use the hotkey f11. Either one will open the styles and formatting window,
just as with writer. This initially appears as a floating window,
but you can anchor it to the left side of the screen by holding down the control key and double
clicking on the bar that holds the icons just under the title styles and formatting. Now note,
the behavior of this window like much that is in Libra Office is actually set for the entire suite.
If you could anchor your styles and formatting window to the left side in writer as I recommended,
it will already be there in Calc when you open it. If you close it in Calc, it will be closed
the next time you open up writer. Now whether this is a good or a bad thing may depend on how
integrated you think Office Suite should be, but you probably do want to know about this behavior.
And you probably won't be surprised to learn that it will show up again in impress, in draw,
and so on. I think that if you use all of the modules of Libra Office with some frequency,
you should probably get used to having it anchored. But if all you ever do is spreadsheet work,
you may not need it on the screen at all times and might prefer to open it when required,
but do get used to what it can do. Even in spreadsheets, I hope to show it is useful.
The styles and formatting window has five icons or buttons on that top row.
So if you hover your mouse over each of them, you get a brief description.
The first one says, sell styles. This lets you apply styles to a cell or group of cells within a sheet.
Page styles. This lets you apply styles to an entire sheet.
Fill format mode. This lets you select a cell style and apply it to a cell or group of cells.
The main use of this is to make a group of scatter cells identical in format.
New style from selection. This lets you create a new style based on a style that is already existing.
That's good if you want to make a different style that is only different in one or two respects.
From the existing one rather than recreating it all from scratch.
And finally, update style. This lets you change the style definition by applying what you have
done to a specific cell. So it's a way of applying a style, in other words.
Now, page styles. All right, that's a style that's applied to an entire sheet.
And that's a little bit different from cell styles.
Now, note that a sheet can actually be many physical pages when printed.
But when we talk about page style, we're talking about an entire worksheet.
Now, within a spreadsheet, you can have multiple worksheets.
And each sheet can have its own page style if you desire.
You can see which page style is applied to a sheet by looking at the bottom status bar.
In the second section of the status bar, for instance, you might see that it says default,
which indicates that it is the default page style that is applied here.
If you have the styles and formatting window open and you go to the page styles tab,
you can see that this is one of two styles available to you. The other is the report style.
As in writer, you can open the properties window for a style by right-clicking on the styles name
in the styles and formatting window and selecting modify from the pop-up menu.
Now, you can set the properties for the page style here.
So if the default style is not what you want, modify it here to reflect what you need it to be.
If you would rather leave this as it is and instead make a new one based on this style,
click on the style name in the styles and formatting window and then go to the new style from
selection button, give it a name and then modify the new style in the same manner as above.
Note that you cannot change the name of any built-in style.
If you want a style that has a different name, either create a new style from the existing style
or create a new one from scratch.
Now, cell styles apply formatting to specific cells or groups of cells.
The best analogy for a proficient user of writer is that they're very similar to paragraph styles
in that module. The out-of-the-box options for cell styles are pretty limited. You get headings
and results. As with page styles, though, you can create your own, either by modifying an existing one
or creating a new one from scratch. Right-click on a style name in the styles and formatting window
to bring up the properties window. As you would expect, the properties options are a little different
here since cells and pages are two different type of object. In fact, two different levels of
object. In general, everything we set about page styles applies to cell styles as well.
From here, we will go into the specifics of using styles in templates, and I will make some
suggestions as to how you can use all of these to simplify your workflow.
But if you want some added reading material to help with this, there is a document called
using styles and templates in Calc, and I have a link to that in the show notes, so you might
find that of some interest. But for now, I think that's enough for a nice little tutorial.
This is Ahuka signing off for Hacker Public Radio, and reminding you, as always, to support free
software. Bye-bye.
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