Thanks for that advice, i'll definitely put my head down and learn more about styles especially now i know about Ctrl-M etc.
all the best Ian On Friday, 2 February 2018 18:05:55 GMT Virgil Arrington wrote: > 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 > > -- opensuse:tumbleweed:20180130 Qt: 5.10.0 KDE Frameworks: 5.42.0 - KDE Plasma: 5.11.95 - kwin 5.11.95 kmail2 5.7.1 - akonadiserver 5.7.1 - Kernel: 4.14.15-1-default - xf86-video-nouveau: 1.0.15 -- 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
