One of the most annoying things in the recent ‘upgrade‘ of the Google Docs editor was the removal of the ‘Edit CSS’ and ‘Edit HTML’ functionality without any replacement (such as a Custom Styles Editor).

Thanks to a discussion on the Google Help forum (where 100’s of people wonder how this could have been called ‘upgrade’) I discovered this hack.

1. Create an empty document in LibreOffice or OpenOffice (MS Office is also reported to work)
2. Change the default styles (using Format –> Styles and Formatting (F11))
3. Upload the resulting document to Google Apps (Note: you will need to convert to GoogleDocs) and use as a template

To get the ARIAL font on Ubuntu I also had to do install the MS Fonts package