Yes there is and it can be applied in most of the OpenOffice applications. I am demonstrating it in Writer below, however the same steps are applied to cells in Calc.
1. Highlight the area from which you wish to copy the format from.
2. Click on the format painter icon in the toolbar.
3. When the mouse looks like a paint bucket, highlight the text to which you want to apply the format.
4. Let the mouse button go and the format will be applied to that section of text.
OpenOffice.org doesn”t natively support the SVG graphics format, which can be an inconvenience, especially considering how many good vector-based images are available in the Open Clip Art Library.
The SVG Import filter adds support for the SVG format, so you can easily open vector-based graphics directly in OpenOffice.org. According to the author, the filter produces nearly perfect results for simple SVG files, though there are still some issues with color and transparency gradients.
When downloading the SVG Import Filter, you might want to take a look at the svg2office batch-processing utility, which can convert multiple SVG files into the OpenOffice.org native graphics format (odg).
UPDATED: A step-by-step how to add the files to your clipart library can be found here.
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For those that need to convert documents from images and graphics into text, you may find ScanR a very useful tool.
It allows you to email JPG documents to their site, and uses OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to transform the picture into a text document that you can then edit. There are some requirements in order to make sure that the picture is clear enough and big enough, but the site gives you an image quality rating for each scan so you can see whether you are using images that they can recognise.
Once scanned you can then edit the text with OpenOffice! 
I can”t say it better than the Open Office team, so:
Introducing new functionality with OpenOffice.org 2.3!
OpenOffice.org 2.3 is available for download now! It includes several new features in addition to the usual improvements to stability, performance, Microsoft Office compatibility and Accessibility. Some of the new and exciting features are available as free extensions which increase OpenOffice.org functionality.
The use of extensions to increase the flexibility of OpenOffice continues the theme of extension and plugin use that is utilised by a number of open source programs, including Firefox and Thunderbird.
Visit the OpenOffice Extension Repository to download and install extra functionality in OpenOffice. I”m particularly interested in the OpenOffice.org2GoogleDocs extension – I”ll try it out and let you know!
My name is Stephanie Krishnan and I'm passionate about the way that open source software and its community can help small businesses and individuals with their productivity and lives. One of the biggest arguments I get from business owners, however, is lack of support options. I decided to put together my own support blog to help people be productive at various levels with one of my favourite open source alternatives: OpenOffice! I do this through tutorials, downloadable templates and answers to questions from readers!
