Problems Style sheets are amazingly useful, but they are not the solution to every problem. Although for most documents it makes sense to apply formatting with styles, for short one-time documents they are overkill. Also, if you need to translate a document from one word processor format to another, style sheets may not be retained. On the other hand, style sheets can work very well for translating to some formats. For instance, AppleWorks, FrameMaker, and Word all use styles to help them export to HTML format.
Most word processors come with a few templates that have style sheets already set up.
With a little work you can create documents that look much better. I'll never forget the time someone asked me which of Word's templates I had used to write a paper. Needless to say, the template wasn't in Word's style gallery, and I had not even used Word to create the document. Creating good templates is not as time consuming as you might think, when you have style sheets on your side. When you press return after typing in a paragraph style, a new paragraph will be created, formatted with the style you selected for the next paragraph.