Writer provides several predefined styles, but you may find that they do not fit in one way or another your preferences. You can build your own library of custom styles to use in place of the predefined ones, or you can modify the existing styles. OOo offers four mechanisms to modify both both predefined and custom (user-created) styles:

• Update a style from a selection.
• Load or copy styles from another document or template.
• Change a style using the Style dialog box.
• Use AutoUpdate (paragraph and frame styles only).

The first two methods are discussed in Update Style (from a selection) and Load Styles (from a template or document), while Chapter 7 (Working with Styles) discusses at length the process of creating a new style.

This section shows how you can quickly make simple modifications to existing paragraph styles using the same tools you would use for applying formatting manually.

Any changes made to a style are effective only in the current document. If you want to reuse modified or new styles in other documents, you need to either save the styles in a template—see Chapter 10 (Working with Templates)—or copy the styles into the other documents, as described in Copying and moving styles.