Changing Openoffice.org Writer Automatic/default Styles?

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A quick foreword: after making the switch to Linux a couple weeks back, I'd have to say it's turned out a lot better than I could possibly have hoped. While OpenOffice.org isn't preinstalled, it takes a matter of minutes to download and, being freeware (and open source, at that), it has a large community that have a whole wealth of knowledge. That said, I didn't fancy signing up for yet another forum (mainly because I have other things to do, and way too many forums on my "to check" list as it is, but also because you folks at Xisto tends to have an answer ready and waiting for me ), and the basic searches didn't turn up much. I found the odd thing relating to what I wanted, but of those I looked at none had an answer (or at least not the one I wanted).

 

So...my problem, or more of a query:

 

OpenOffice.org Writer is the particular application I'm most interested in, as it's the one I'm currently using most. That said, I've barely tried the others yet, so bare with me if you think it may apply to them as well...

 

Being the sort of person that I am, I have a certain level of organisation that I'd quite like to achieve in nigh on everything I do. Sometimes, this part of me drives me mad by being stubborn and never quite happy with my work. I may be able to find a workaround, but even then I personally know it's not right, and that bugs me.

 

In the Styles and Formatting "area", you'll notice that there's the option to show the styles by hierarchy. This appeals to me, as I like the idea of cascading styles (the same sort of reason I tend to use CSS), but me being me wants to make styles from scratch, without all of the defaults already there. Fair enough, I can create a style that isn't linked to any others, and it then sits outside of the normal default style's child tree, but annoyingly the default style sits at the top of this little area, and any non-linked styles you add have to be below it, regardless of where they should be alphabetically.

 

So, the way I see it, I have two choices:

 

Ignore it, and create my styles outside of the default, meaning that I have to scroll down most times I want to apply styles, as the blasted thing seems to expand itself quite a lot.

Find a way of modifying the automatic styles, i.e. the ones that OO.org ships with, such that I can get rid of the ones I don't want, re-name/structure/organise those I do, as I find it annoying that you can't rename the automatic styles, nor delete them...makes things seem cluttered.

Alternatively, is there perhaps a way of showing only the styles that have been applied in the hierarchy menu? As fun as seeing 101 different headings whenever I open up the heading section, I generally stick to using just a few.

 

My next question would be about what would be "good practice" when it comes to this sort of thing? Creating a whole bunch more styles naturally adds to the volume of data with every document, whereas modifying style defaults would have less of an impact on this. I suppose my main issue is having to filter through all of the styles I don't use, but keep appearing as defaults (for example, when inserting a caption).

 

Any thoughts or comments on this?