I create a document in libre, save as .doc. When I open in in libre my tabs are not visible. I say this because if I open in google docs the tabs are fine, but in libre, not visible, every line is set fully to the left, if I hit tab, the line will not move HOWEVER if I hit tab a few times, sure enough in google docs the line is yeeted all those tabs over. How do I make the tabbing visible in libre. I cannot just hit tab and in my heart know it is there. I need to see it.
Please edit your question to make it understandable. Most of us are not native English speakers and we need basic standard English (what is “yeeted”?)
There also seems to be a contradiction between your title “Preserve tab settings” (meaning they have been wiped out and there are no more tabs in the paragraph definitions) and “I need to see it” (meaning you want a visual clue about the existence of a tab).
Also, remove tag common telling the problem is “common” to Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw and Base. Instead, use writer which will silence the warning about mandatory tag.
What do you mean with default_settings. There are no default tab stops apart evenly spaced tab stops (which are rather a nuisance).
Well it would not let me post without writer or common tagged, but when I typed writer it did not come up with just that, only choice that was reasonable was libre-writer. So I added common from the choices it made be choose from. YEETED means when I am working the tabs do not move anything, if you hit tab multiple times you do not see action on screen. If you save and open in another program, sure enough all the tab presses were honored, and now the text is (moved way over) to the right, as the tab did work. I simply want to see the text move when I hit the tab key. Currently the only way to do this (as stated) is to high light every paragraph, go into Format----Paragraph—tabs and change the position to 0.5 and even then it seems to have worked, except now i have two tabs and have to remove one, for every paragraph.
The document works fine in google docs. I am going to delete libre. So sorry the verbiage in my question was not perfect. Google docs seems perfect for my needs.
When you enable View>Formatting Marks, do you see some symbol (a light blue horizontal left-to-right arrow) for every typed tab? If not, there is a problem somewhere else. Maybe a spurious keyboard combination has reassigned tab to some other function.
Which is your version? is it tdf#134548?
LibreOffice 6.4.5 WIN_64
So exactly the version affected by the problem in the bug; likely your problem is the same - so you may try to downgrade to 6.4.4.
Thank you that indeed solved my problem. I truly thought I was crazy because I would fix the tabs only for the problem to recur. I apologize I am not as tech savvy as the rest of you, I have done well with libre for years up to this point. Thank you for helping resolve my problem. Next time I run into a headache I will see if downgrading to the previous version works.
No need to apologize - we all don’t know everything, and “Ask a question” site is likely to ask questions about what we don’t know 
But next time please don’t forget to mention data like “I use LibreOffice version X on Windows ??? x64”, and like “it worked before”, …
The bug is fixed in the next version (6.4.6 and 7.0).