This is Chapter 4 of the OpenOffice.org 3 Calc Guide, produced by the OOoAuthors group.

What is a template?

A template is a model that you use to create other documents. For example, you can create a template for invoices that has your company’s logo and address at the top of the page. New spreadsheets created from this template will all have your company’s logo and address on the first page.

Templates can contain anything that regular documents can contain, such as text, graphics, styles, and user-specific setup information such as measurement units, language, the default printer, and toolbar and menu customization.

All documents—text, spreadsheets, presentations, drawings—in OpenOffice.org are based on templates. You can create, or download and install, as many templates as you wish. When you start a new spreadsheet without choosing a specific template (as described in Creating a spreadsheet from a template), the new spreadsheet is based on the default template for spreadsheets. If you have not specified a default template, OOo uses the blank spreadsheet template that is installed with OOo. See Setting a default template”.

This chapter describes how to create, use, modify, and organise templates. We begin by describing styles and their use, as styles are a major component of templates.

What are styles?

A style is a set of formats that you can apply to selected elements in a document to quickly change their appearance. When you apply a style, you apply a whole group of formats at the same time.

Many people manually format spreadsheet cells and pages without paying any attention to styles. They are used to formatting documents according to physical attributes. For example, for the contents of a cell you might specify the font family, font size, and any formatting such as bold or italic.

Styles are logical attributes. Using styles means that you stop saying “font size 14pt, Times New Roman, bold, centered”, and you start saying “Title” because you have defined the “Title” style to have those characteristics. In other words, styles means that you shift the emphasis from what the text (or page, or other element) looks like, to what the text is.

Styles help improve consistency in a document and can greatly speed up formatting. They also make major formatting changes easy. For example, you may decide to change the appearance of all subtotals in your spreadsheet to be 10 pt. Arial instead of 8 pt. Times New Roman after you have created a 15-page spreadsheet; you can change all of the subtotals in the document by simply changing the properties for the subtotal style.

Page styles assist with printing, so you don’t need to define margins, headers and footers, and other printing attributes each time you print a spreadsheet.

This chapter describes the styles OOo Calc offers, what they might be used for, and how to apply styles, change existing styles, and create new styles.