List styles (also called numbering styles) work with paragraph styles. They define indentation, alignment, and the numbering or bullet characters used for numbered or bulleted lists. You can define many list styles to use for different purposes, from simple bulleted lists to complex multi-level lists.

As with other styles, the main reasons for using list styles are consistency and speeding up your work. Although you can create simple lists quickly by clicking the Numbering On/Off or Bullets On/Off icons on the Formatting toolbar, and use the icons on the Bullets and Numbering toolbar to create quite complex nested lists, the appearance of the resulting lists may not be what you want—and you might want to have more than one style of list. You can use the Bullets and Numbering choice on the Format menu to manually format the appearance of some or all of the lists, but what if you later need to change their appearance?

OOo uses the terms “numbering style” and “list style” inconsistently, but they are the same thing. For example, the tooltip in the Styles and Formatting window says “List Styles”, but its style dialog box says “Numbering Style”.