Page layout and styles

Hello students, welcome to Kwickprep. Your project has fifteen headings, and your teacher asks you to change all of them to blue. Will you change them one by one? Today we learn page layout and styles, which make this a one click job.

First, a new term. Page layout means how the whole page is set up before printing. It includes the paper size and the direction of the page. It also includes margins, headers, footers and page numbers. In LibreOffice Writer, most of these are in Format, then Page Style, and in Microsoft Word they are on the Layout tab.

On the Page tab, we first choose the paper size. A4 is the standard size used in Indian schools and offices. Legal paper is longer and is used for some forms. Orientation means the direction of the page. Portrait is tall, for letters and notes. Landscape is wide, which is good for a big timetable or a wide table.

Next, margins. A margin is the blank space between the edge of the paper and the text. Every page has four margins, top, bottom, left and right. If you will bind or staple a project, keep the left margin a little wider. In Writer, you type the margin sizes in centimetres on the Page tab.

Now headers and footers. A header is an area at the top of every page, good for the project title. A footer is an area at the bottom of every page, often used for page numbers. In Writer, switch them on from the Header and Footer tabs, then click in the footer and choose Insert, then Field, then Page Number. You type them only once, and they repeat on every page automatically.

Sometimes a new chapter must start on a new page. The word processor starts a new page by itself only when a page is full. A page break forces the next text to begin on a new page. Press Control plus Enter to insert one. Do not press Enter many times instead, because the gap will break when you add text above.

Now the second half of our title, styles. A style is a saved set of formatting with a name. For example, the style Heading 1 stores the font, size, bold and spacing together. You apply all those formats in one click. And if you change the style once, every heading using that style changes too.

Writer comes with ready made styles. Heading 1 is for chapter titles, and its shortcut is Control plus one. Heading 2 is for sub headings, with Control plus two. Body Text is for normal paragraphs, and it has no shortcut. Title is for the big name on the cover page.

Here is how to use styles in Writer. Press F11 to open the Styles deck in the sidebar. Click anywhere in a paragraph, then double-click a style name to apply it. You can also choose a style from the drop down list on the formatting toolbar. To change a style, right-click its name and choose Modify.

Let us pause and predict. Aarav used the Heading 1 style for all fifteen headings in his project. He right-clicks Heading 1, chooses Modify, and sets the colour to blue. How many headings turn blue? All fifteen change at once, because they all use the same style. This is exactly how we solve the problem from the start of the lesson.

Styles give one more gift. A table of contents lists headings with their page numbers, and Writer builds it from heading styles. Choose Insert, then Table of Contents and Index, then Table of Contents, Index or Bibliography. If you add pages later, right-click the table and choose Update Index.

Let us recap. Page layout covers the paper size, orientation and margins. Headers and footers repeat on every page, and are the place for page numbers. Control plus Enter inserts a page break. A style is a saved, named set of formats. When you modify a style, every paragraph using it updates at once.