How to apply a formatting change across all documents?

[ReLink2013]

I am trying desperately to make LibreOffice my default suite, I have MSOffice 2010 installed in wine, but my work computer is a low end centrino CPU so it really bogs things down, and its expensive so I want to try to avoid purchasing more licences in the future.

My issue is that I need to find a way to have LibreOffice apply the setting under “Format > Paragraph” “Dont add space between paragraphs of the same style” by default to any document I open. Every formatting issue ive had opening docx files has been fixed by manually changing this setting. However I have 100’s of docx files all containing 10 cells each for tags that we print for products where I work. Obviously manually changing this setting for each cell is not an option. How can I make this stick for everything? or at the very least change it on all files at once?

On a somewhat related note, I have Lotus Symphony installed and it works beautifully and does everything I need, but unfortunately 3.0.1 will be the last version, IBM has given the code over to the Apache OpenOffice people. I also tried OpenOffice, and it works just fine as well, but its ugly as all get out, and development and updates are nearly nonexistent.

[oweng]

If the styling in your documents is all identical it may be easier to write a script to unzip the DOCX, edit the XML, and write back the edited version. Styles are document-based, unless there is an associated template. Since v4.0 the template management in LO has undergone a fairly substantial change.

This answer is relevant for LO v3.x, however the related comment points out a v4.0 UI issue (FDO#60589) for which only a manual workaround is currently available. There is a debate in that thread about the relationship between styles and templates that may be worth reading.

This answer details how to associate a template in such a manner that it is automatically checked when the related document is opened. Again though, this is really only of use if you already have an associated template (and the files are of native format). How effective this is for DOCX I am uncertain.