Just as you use paragraph and character styles to quickly format text, you can use object styles to quickly format graphics and frames. Object styles include settings for stroke, color, transparency, drop shadows, paragraph styles, text wrap, and more. You can assign different transparency effects for the object, fill, stroke, and text.
You can apply object styles to objects, groups, and frames (including text frames). A style can either clear and replace all object settings or it can replace only specific settings, leaving other settings unchanged. You control which settings the style affects by including or excluding a category of settings in the definition.
When creating styles, you might find that several styles share some of the same characteristics. Rather than setting those characteristics each time you define the next style, you can base one object style on another. When you change the base style, any shared attributes that appear in the “parent” style change in the “child” style as well.
For a video on using object styles, see www.adobe.com/go/vid0072.