Calc Guide

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 in OpenOffice.org are based on templates. You can create, or download
and install, as many templates as you wish. If you do not specify a template when you
start a new a new spreadsheet, 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” on
page 113.
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.
Types of styles in Calc
While some components of OOo offer many style types, Calc offers only two:
• Cell styles include fonts, alignment, borders, background, number formats (for
example, currency, date, number), and cell protection.
• Page styles include margins, headers and footers, borders and backgrounds,
and the sequence for printing sheets. The page size, orientation, and other
attributes of a page style apply only when a spreadsheet is printed; they are
not displayed onscreen.
Chapter 4 Using Styles and Templates in Calc 99