Format Bar. This is the standard format bar for all OpenOffice.org applications which you can use to change fonts, colors, alignment, etc. of the application's data.

Rulers. Define the horizontal location of the text and format elements. Rulers are very useful when you want to establish tabulation and paragraph indentation.

Work Area. Where you enter the content of your document: words, numbers, images, tables, hyperlinks, etc.

Insertion Point. All characters typed on your keyboard will be placed at the left of this point. Also called the cursor.

Page Style. Many elements define style: page size, margins, text-orientation, etc. Page style can be changed by choosing Format → Page from the menu. You may use the predefined styles, or define your own.

Word processor users often waste a lot of time formatting their documents: changing paragraph alignment, font family, weight and size, etc. Instead, they should concentrate on document structure and content writing.

 Styles provide a structure-centric approach to writing documents with a word processor, while normalizing document formatting and layout, and easily automating the generation and maintenance of tables of contents (TOC), indexes, references, etc. In OpenOffice.org Writer, styles are handled using the Stylist. Click on its icon in the Format Bar to open or close it.

Use the styles listed in Table 3.1, “Suggested Text Styles” as a guide. Select the region of the document to apply the style to, and in the Stylist window, double-click on the style you want to apply to that region.

Use lists to enumerate the properties of an object (“unordered” or “bullet” list), or the steps to be performed to do a task (an “ordered” or “numbered” list).

 Click on this button to format the selected text into an unordered list. Select the list items and choose Format → Bullets and Numbering from the menu to select the bullet type from a predefined set.

 Clicking on this button formats the selected text into an ordered list. The same rules as for unordered lists apply to the numbering format.

By default page headers and footers are common to all pages of a document. Use them to describe aspects of a document's content, for example: page number, total number of pages, chapter, section, document title, etc.

Choose Insert+Header → Default from the menu to add a page header to your document, and choose Insert+Footer → Default to add a page footer to your document. Just type the header or footer text or use one or more of the Insert → Fields menu items to compose your headers and footers.