Note: This is part of a three-part post on styles. See this post for the intro and links to the other posts.
Why should you use styles?
Lots and lots of reasons.
Styles Mean You Do the Formatting Once, Then Apply It Quickly Each Additional Time
Styles aren't so necessary for your short scathing memo to your intern, but anything longer and more complex will be a lot easier to format with styles.
Let's say you've got a 100-page white paper on how your company's flotsam server works. You've got these types of things in the document:
- Four levels of headings in various sizes and the same font (Arial)
- Regular body text in 12 point type and Times New Roman font
- Notes in bold, 10-point Arial, indented a half inch from the left
- Warnings bold and italic 10-point Arial, indented a half inch from the left
- Numbered lists with 1 at the top level, A at the 2nd level, and a special purple bullet at the third level
A cover page with no footer, introductory text that should be numbered in roman numerals, main body text with arabic numbers in the footer and the document title in the header, and two pages with big diagrams that need to be landscape (horizontal)
Do you really want to painfully do the formatting of every heading, every bulleted list, ever note and warning, every page, manually each time you have a new one?
You really don't.
With styles, you just do the formatting for each heading and each other formatted element of the document once, and then you just select the text and select the style each time you want to apply the formatting. Instead of selecting the text, clicking the Bold icon, clicking the Italic icon, selecting the font size, selecting the font, indenting the text....and so on for every freakin' individual chunk of differently formatted text.
Styles Mean You Can Update a Long Document's Formatting Easily
Let's say you wrote that 100-page white paper and formatted it manually. There's a layoff and you have a new manager who tells you that your paper needs to conform to the corporate marketing formatting standards. Which are completely different.
If you formatted it manually, you have days of work ahead of you.
If you formatted it with styles, you just need to either import a template from the corporate marketing group and be done with it. That's the best case scenario. If your marketing group isn't that organized, then you just need to update about 15 styles. That's all. When you update the styles, all the text says to itself “Oh, I'm Heading3, and Heading3 has changed. I'd better change too.”
Styles Are Required for a Lot of Essential Features in OpenOffice.org.
Do you want to create a table of contents? Do some fancy formatting in a table of contents or list? Do running headers? Do conditional formatting in a spreadsheet? You're going to need styles.