Ever got fed up with change­ing every head­line in your doc­u­ment by hand? Ever got fed up with update your table of con­tent by hand? Yes? So here is a (very) short howto use OpenOffice.org Writer for doing this for you.
I decided to write this only for OpenOf­fice for two rea­sons. First OpenOf­fice ist Open­Source and works with more than one Oper­at­ing Sys­tem (for me I can’t use MS Office because I’m using Linux). Sec­ond the idea behind Styles and For­mats are the same for the most Office-Software.
The first thing you have to do is to install OpenOf­fice on your sys­tem. Down­load it here.

Styles and Formats

Now lets start. At the begin­ning there is an empty text doc­u­ment. If you don’t have already one cre­ate it with [ctrl+n] or with the file-menu file->new. Every­time you have to open an entry in a menu I will write it like this menu->entry.

Check if you have the “Styles and Formats”-Toolbox open. If not, go to Format->Styles and For­mats or press [F11]. Click into Head­line 1 (don’t select it).

Write those lines in your doc­u­ment:
Styles and For­mats
a short how to use them with Open Office 2.1
Head­line 1
Head­line 2
Head­line 4
nor­mal text

Now double-click on Head­line 1 in your “Styles and Formats”-Toolbox. Do this for the other head­lines as for head­line 1 but select the match­ing type.
To for­mat the first two lines select “Chap­tertem­plates” from the pull down menu you can see on the upper pic­ture. There you set the first line to “Title” and the sec­ond line to “sub­ti­tle”.
Now you should have some­thing like this:

Maybe you ask why to do this in that way. What would hap­pen if you have to change the for­mat of your head­lines? If you use Styles and For­mats you only have to change the tem­plate and every text with the accord­ing type will use the new para­me­ters. In the upper pic­ture you can see a dia­log for chang­ing the style and for­mat for the Head­ing 1 tem­plate. You can open this dia­log by right-clicking on “Head­line 1″ in  you “Styles and Formats”-Toolbox and selct “change”. Now you can change the font-type, size, familily, style, the align­ment and much more.
This should make the work with large doc­u­ments much easier.

And here is another rea­son to use “Styles and For­mats”. If you have to make a Table of con­tent now the pro­gramme do the work for you!

Cre­at­ing a TOC

Use the doc­u­ment from above and try to cre­ate a TOC. First open Insert->Indexes and Tables. Now a dia­log like this should appear:

The left part of the dia­log shows you am pre­view of the TOC. The right part allows you to change the appear of the appear­ance of you TOC. For the fist time just use the stan­dard options — later you can play with them arround to get used to the dia­log. Click on OK. OpenOf­fice will insert the TOC at the cur­sors position.

As you can see here the TOC is gray. The gray color stands for spe­cial fields inside a text. Now just right click into the gray text. A con­text menu will open. One option is: “Update Index”. So if you have writ­ten new text or changed the struc­ture of your doc­u­ment just click on “Update Index” and the TOC should be up to date.

I hope this short howto helped you a lit­tle bit. For MS Office it is nearly the same (I guess and hope). Maybe the names of the dialogs and menus are dif­fer­ent. If you wan’t to know more or if you habe ideas for other top­ics just post a ques­tion (after registering).

Have fun!