Formatting documents using predefined formats (Autostyles)

An Autostyle is a collection of formatting properties saved for various control types (text fields, lines, and so on). Autostyles allow you to select presentation styles for your documents and propagate a document's formatting or appearance to other documents. They serve as a standard allowing you to change the format of a document to match the needs of your users. You can use the Autostyles provided by MicroStrategy or create custom Autostyles to meet your reporting requirements. Once you design a document with a look or style that you want to reuse, create an Autostyle to reuse its formatting.

When you apply an Autostyle to another document, the system copies formatting information from the Autostyle onto the target document. It replaces formatting properties for all sections and controls (including Grid/Graphs) on the target document with the corresponding properties in the Autostyle. If there is no corresponding section or control on the Autostyle document, it applies the default format for this control type in the Autostyle. If an Autostyle has multiple controls of the same type in one section, the format of the first control of this type in that section is used.

For a multi-layout document, an Autostyle is applied only to the current layout, not the entire document. If the Page Header and Page Footer are shared among layouts, any formatting changes applied to those sections are applied throughout the document. Page Headers and Page Footers are shared by default; see Using separate Page Headers and Page Footers for layouts for instructions to change that. For more information on the Page Header/Footer, see Page Headers and Page Footers. For more information on multi-layout documents, including which properties apply to the document as a whole or to individual layouts, see Creating multi-layout documents.

You can create your own Autostyles or use the Autostyles provided by MicroStrategy. For instructions, see the following:

• Creating Autostyles for documents

• Applying Autostyles to documents

A document Autostyle is different from a report Autostyle. A document Autostyle is a document object and can only be applied to documents. A report Autostyle is an Autostyle object and can be applied to reports and to grids within documents. Both types of Autostyles contain formatting information. For each preconfigured report Autostyle, a matching document Autostyle exists.