Episode: 1705
Title: HPR1705: 47 - LibreOffice Calc - Page Styles and Page Settings
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1705/hpr1705.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 08:02:53

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It's Friday 13th of February 2015.
This is in HPR episode 1,705 entitled, 47, Libra Office Calc, PageTiles, and PageSettings
and is part of the series, Libra Office.
It is hosted by a huker, and is about 21 minutes long.
Feedback can be sent to Wilnick at Wilnick.com or by leaving a comment on this episode.
The summary is how to control the overall appearance of a worksheet using PageTiles and PageSettings.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by AnanasThost.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15, that's HPR15.
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Hello, this is Ahuka, welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio in another exciting episode
in our series on Libra Office Calc.
Last time we talked about templates in the spreadsheet world, and we said that templates
are where styles live, so now it's time to start taking a look at those styles, and
what I want to do this time is take a look at PageStiles and some of the PageSettings
that can also be used.
Now PageStiles and Libra Office Calc set the properties for entire sheets of your workbook
file.
Now, in any given template, you can have different sheets with different PageStiles if you wish.
But for any given sheet, you can only have one PageStile.
And don't be confused by the difference between a sheet in the file and a page when printed.
One single sheet may take many physical pages to print, but it is all one sheet and it
is all governed by a single PageStile.
Now you want to learn how to make these PageStiles your own.
So go with your styles and formatting window open, and anchored to the side of your page,
just go to the PageStiles button, and click on it.
It is the second one from the left, the first one being the SellStiles button.
You will probably see two PageStiles already there in the out-of-box configuration, default,
and report.
You can edit either of them by right-clicking on it and selecting Modify.
If you do that, you will change that style.
Alternatively, you can create a new style based on the existing style, give it a new name,
and add to your PageStiles collection.
To do that, you select the PageStile you want to use as your starting point, then go
to the New Style from Selection button, which is the second from the right.
And finally, you can start from scratch by right-clicking anywhere inside of the styles
and formatting window and selecting New.
So you have lots of options.
Now I plan to modify my default PageStile, but I know from the last tutorial that if I
don't first open my default template, I won't be saving any of my work.
I created my own default template last time, which I named K-O-B Default.
So now I go to the Template Manager, go to the My Templates folder, select the K-O-B Default
template, and then click the Edit button on top.
I check the title bar at the very top, and it reads K-O-B Default.O-T-S.
So I know that I'm now in my default template.
Any changes I make and save will show up in every spreadsheet I open from now on, as
long as I don't specifically choose some other template.
Now that I'm in my default template, I right-click on the default PageStile and select Modify.
This opens the Properties window for the default PageStile.
This looks a bit like the ones we used in Writer, and that should not be a surprise.
LibraOffice is a unified suite, so things should be much the same no matter which module
you are in.
As I've mentioned before, the developers of LibraOffice really don't like reinventing
the wheel any more than is necessary.
So let's take a look at the tabs and make some settings.
First one is Organizer.
There's really not anything you can do on this tab.
This is a built-in style, so you cannot rename it, you cannot link it to another style.
If these are things you really need to do, you should create a new style based on this
and give it whatever name you like and make your links there.
Now, linking styles is something fairly advanced, so I don't recommend it to someone
still learning about styles, a lot can go wrong.
But note that we can create a new style, assign it to the blank sheet, and since this
is the default template, every new spreadsheet we create from this template will use that new
style.
The next tab is Page.
This gives you printer settings, basically, since I am in the United States, it specifies
letter size paper with the dimensions eight and a half inches by 11 inches.
It picks this up from my computer that I'm located in the US and applies the appropriate
settings.
Note that I can change it here, in this style, however, if I wanted to use, for example,
A4 paper.
Just click the drop-down button, change letter to A4.
Note this will still leave your measurements in inches.
If you want to change that to millimeters, there is a setting in Libra Office to make
this change, but it makes the change for Libra Office Calc in general, not just for this
particular template.
So to do this, go to Tools, Options, Libra Office Calc, General, and make the change.
But if you installed Libra Office in a country that uses sensible measurements, you probably
don't need to change anything.
For a default template, there's not a lot on this tab that merits a change.
If you were creating a template for something wide and wanted to use wider paper, such as
what we call legal size, 8.5 x 14 inches, you could specify a paper tray that always has
that size of paper, but this is a default.
And I don't see the deed to mess around with the margins here, but I will make the change
from portrait to landscape for my orientation.
Most of the time, the things I print from Calc require this orientation, so it makes sense
to specify it in the default.
This is where you would set borders for the sheet as a whole, not for individual cells.
Quite possibly you will never need to use this.
Background.
You can apply either a color as a background or an image.
And again, this applies to the sheet as a whole, and you may never need to use it.
If you create a detailed template where you want to put background colors or images into
specific cells, then you would use cell styles to do that.
Header.
This is for laying out the page.
You use this to specify the space you set aside for a header, margins to apply, and so
on.
You can also set this up to have left and right pages be different, which is similar
to what we saw in page styles for Writer.
The important thing to keep in mind is that this is not where you put in the content of
the header.
You're creating a space in which the content can be placed, but you don't place the content
here.
We'll talk about how to do that.
Footer.
Very much the same thing is with headers.
The tabs are identical in appearance, the only difference is footers are on the bottom
and headers are on the top.
Now for all of these, you can click the more button that's going to allow you to apply
borders and shadows and all of that.
Just because you can do it doesn't mean you should do it.
Less is more sometimes.
Now the Sheep tab, this has some useful stuff.
The first section is the print order for large spreadsheets that won't fit on a single
page.
The default is to print the first so many columns and then keep going down the spreadsheet
until all rows have had those columns printed.
Then jump all the way back up to the top and grab the next so many columns and go all the
way down the sheet until all of those have been printed.
You may be fine with that.
For a lot of the stuff I do, I want to be able to read rows across so that makes no sense.
The alternative is to print the first so many rows and then keep jumping to the next
group of columns and print those same rows and then go to the next group of columns and
print those same rows.
When you've done with that group of rows, you drop down and start the next group of
rows.
I'm going to change it to the left to right then down option.
Then in the print section, you can select the things you want to automatically print.
First column and row headers.
This will print the row numbers 1, 2, 3, 4 going down and the column letters A, B, C, D going
across.
I usually like this so I will turn it on.
Grid.
Usually when you print the spreadsheet, none of the grid lines are printed.
I find this makes the printed copy much harder to follow since you can't easily tell when
numbers are on the same line.
So I always turn this on.
I like to have the grid.
If you don't, that's fine.
That's why it's an option.
Comments.
One of the things you can do in a spreadsheet is attach comments to specific cells and you
can read them with a mouse over.
This would have them printed on a separate sheet of paper and identified with a cell reference.
Obviously you really need to be printing row and column headers for this to work at all
since that is the only way to accurately use cell addresses.
It doesn't hurt to turn this on since if you rarely use comments, it won't matter.
And when you do use comments, you probably want this so I turn it on.
Objects slash graphics.
If you have put these into your spreadsheet, you probably want them to be printed.
This is usually on by default anyway.
Charts.
We covered how to create charts.
And if you created one in your spreadsheet, you probably want it printed.
This is normally on by default.
Drawing objects.
If you put one in your spreadsheet, you probably want to print it.
Essentially this is a graphic, but instead of being a static file, it retains its identity
as something created in draw and can be edited within Libra Office.
Again, this is on by default.
Formulas.
This would print the actual formulas used instead of the results of those formulas.
Recall that we made a careful distinction between these earlier in the series.
I think it is very rare that you'd want to do this, so I would probably leave it blank.
Zero values.
That would print cells that have a zero value.
No reason not that I can say so it is on by default.
The thing to keep in mind is that we are editing the default template.
So we are making the choices that we will most often want to use.
You can always override these settings for any particular spreadsheet whenever you want
to by going to Format page, which will open the very same page styles properties window.
But if you find yourself always going into this window to turn on grid lines, for instance,
why not save yourself some trouble and put it into your default template that way?
Now, the last thing on this tab is the scale setting.
I tend to leave this at 100% since I can never predict what I will need to do in any given
spreadsheet when I need to print it out.
This is one setting I do on a case by case basis.
Now once you have finished making your setting in the page styles window, click OK.
Now you will want to make sure this style has been applied to your sheet.
So go to the Styles and Formatting window, click the Page Styles button, and double click
on the default style to apply your modified style to the open page in your new default template.
If your default template opens a new spreadsheet with more than one sheet in it, mine only opens
with just one because that's the way I have it set up as we discussed in earlier tutorial.
You will need to repeat this procedure for every sheet in your template.
These settings will now be default for all new sheets you create from the default template.
Now there are other page settings that are worth talking about that do not reside in the
page styles.
So you can do some other things such as set your printer settings.
Go to the File menu, Printer Settings if you need to do this.
Now in most cases you don't really need to do this unless you have several printers available
to you and want to use a non default printer.
Since I'm working on my default template though, I will pass that by.
Recall that I mentioned above that the content of headers and footers is not set in the page
style.
The formatting of the page layout is there, such as how much space to leave, whether
or not you wanted a border around it, and so on.
But to actually fill in content, you need to go to the Edit menu and select headers and
footers.
This brings up an Edit menu just for creating headers and footers.
Now I do not have a use case right now where I need to set a default header, but there
are default footers I like to have.
So I go to the second tab, Footer, and take a look.
Calc divides the footer area into three regions.
I left a right and a center.
You can place elements in each of these areas.
Bear in mind that this is in the bottom area of the page.
So filling across is usually better than putting multiple entries in one area going down.
The idea is that we can insert into one of these areas, some text or a field, to add content
about the page.
I generally like to add some things by default down here.
First, because I work in a networked environment and share documents with others on my team,
I like to include the file name and path of the spreadsheet.
And I can do that by clicking on the footer drop down and looking for a selection.
I see two options here.
One is just the file name and path, and another that also adds the page number.
Since I like both, I click on this to add it.
And page one appears in the center area, and the file name and path appears in the
right area.
As it happens, I want the file name and path to be in the left area.
So I just click and drag this field from the right to the left.
Next I have page number, but I like to add the total number of pages as well.
So I edit the center area to add after the page field, put in a space, type the word
OF or of another space after the number one.
Then I go to the custom footer buttons on the bottom and click the button that says pages
when I mouse over it.
I click this button and it adds a 99.
My middle field now reads page one of 99.
But note that both the number one and the number 99 have a gray background.
So does my file and path.
What that means is that these are fields, which will be replaced by actual data when the
spreadsheet is created.
Now in my blank right area, I click to insert another item.
Go down to the custom footer and click the date button.
This inserts a date field, and right now it reads 00 slash 00 slash 00 slash 00.
But this is also in a gray background, so I know that it will be replaced by the actual
date later.
For all of these, you can also adjust the font by using the text attributes button, but
I usually don't bother in a footer.
If I were doing a header, however, I might want to make it larger and bold.
When you are done, click OK to save this to your default template.
The last step is to make sure you save the template.
This Libra Office already knows this is a template you are editing if you had opened
it the way I told you to at the beginning.
Just click the save button.
Now I would test at this point.
Let's make sure we didn't work properly.
Go to File, New, Spreadsheet.
This should create a brand new spreadsheet based on the default template.
So we will check the page properties by going to Format, Page, and checking the settings.
I changed the orientation of the Page tab, and I can see, yes, it is now landscape by
default.
Then I check the Sheet tab and see that my page order is now left to right and then down.
I see the grid lines are turned on by default, and all of the other changes are there.
Then I open the Edit, Headers, and Footers, and verify that the changes I made there
are in place.
Finally, I click the plus button at the bottom to add a sheet and repeat the verification.
If everything checks out, I know I have now gotten my new default page style to govern
my new default template.
If you do not succeed with this verification testing, go back and make sure you definitely
set your new template as the default that you definitely did apply the new style to each
sheet and so on.
So next time, Sell Styles.
So this is Ahuka signing off for Hacker Public Radio, and as always, telling you support
free software.
Bye bye.
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