How to easily update styles on the fly in LibreOffice 5.4

If you're a LibreOffice power user, you have probably ventured into the realm of styles. And why wouldn't you? You craft those documents to perfection and you want them to look as good as possible. However, what happens when you adjust one of the many styles to perfectly fit your needs, only to find out the changes to the style aren't reflected throughout the document? If this is a long document, say a book or system documentation, the process of going through that document and manually changing each of those styles would be time consuming at best. How do you avoid this?

Fortunately, LibreOffice includes the means to update those styles on the fly. With the click of a single button, you can update every instance of that modified style in your document.

How do you do this? Let me show you.

Let's say you want to change the Heading 3 style to be centered. Your document is complete, but all of the Heading 3 styles are aligned to the left edge. To fix this, highlight the first instance of this style, make the modification, and then click the Update Style button or the Control Shift F11 key combination. The style will automatically update through the entire document and you're done.

There is one caveat, in that it only works in the current document and doesn't change the style permanently for all documents. If you want to permanently change the style, you have to create a new default template with your desired settings. That's another discussion for another day. Happy stylin'.

Also see

• How to get rid of blank space at the bottom of LibreOffice Writer documents (TechRepublic Video)
• How to download LibreOffice documents from Google Drive in their native format (TechRepublic)
• How to connect LibreOffice Base to a remote MySQL database (TechRepublic)
• How to save LibreOffice documents to your Nextcloud server (TechRepublic)
• LibreOffice 5.4: The best office suite gets better (ZDNet)