On 02/02/2018 05:20 AM, Ianseeks wrote: > I think this is where i went wrong. Is there an obvious indicator that > shows its direct formatting as opposed to a style? It would be handy > when picking up someone else's document (which is what happened here)
I'm not sure that there is. In my career as a lawyer (I'm now retired), I often had to share documents with other people. We had contracts going back and forth with each side adding and subtracting edits. By the end, it was a formatting nightmare with styles and direct formatting all clashing with one another. Sometimes the document would get so corrupted it would crash the word processor. Usually, once the substance was completed, as a last step in the process, I would reformat the entire document (because I'm obsessive about these things, and I really enjoy doing it). I would start by stripping all the direct formatting (Ctrl-A, Ctrl-M), and then I would go through and apply all of my own paragraph styles. Nobody ever complained because the finished product usually looked pretty good and was readable. It doesn't take as much time as you might think. After stripping the formatting, I would then press Ctrl-A again to select the entire document, and then apply the most predominant style (typically my BodySingleIndent). I would then go through the document and apply special styles to the appropriate paragraphs, such as a Heading1 or Heading2 for headings and subheadings. After I retired, I briefly taught a Law Office Technology course at the college level. For an exercise, I would give my students a plain text file and then tell them to format it to make it look like a given finished product, that I would give them in hard copy form. After they would spend twenty minutes wrestling with direct formatting, I would then demonstrate how do do it in about 45 seconds using styles. In my current teaching position, I have given my students a book report for an old book that is now in the public domain. To keep them from having to buy the book, I downloaded the pure text file of the book, inserted it into LO and reformatted it using my styles. I pressed Ctrl-A and applied BodySingleIndent to the whole text, and then went back and applied a style called Heading1 for each chapter title. By using Heading1 for the chapter titles, I was then able to automatically generate a table of contents, and then I created a title page with some other special paragraph styles. The whole process for a 188 page (letter-sized) novel took me no more than 15 minutes, and that was only because I had to examine each page to find my chapter titles or other paragraphs that needed special styling (such as a block quote, etc.). Learning Styles is definitely worth the investment in time. Virgil -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: users+unsubscr...@global.libreoffice.org Problems? https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: https://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/users/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted