I’m on LO 7.5.0.2.
I see that changes made to the formatting of Bullets (specifically the amount of indents), even when made to a template, are not carried through to new documents. Nor are they injected when doing a “Load Styles from Template” command.
How then does one set Bullet formatting to be permanent. Changing it for each new document amounts to a lot of tedious work.
Thank you.
I would think there would be a way to set a new default like you can in Word, but I couldn’t find anything. One workaround would be to make a style for the bullet or numbering format you want and simply select that style from the toolbar on the right (or from the Styles menu at the top, whichever you use).
To do that, create your list and format it the way you want, then select the list. Click on the Style menu and then New Style from Selection (near the bottom). You’ll get a dialog box where you can give the style a name and description. Save it, and the next time you want to use that format, just choose that style from the list.
It’s not perfect, I know, but it does work. Hope this helps. 
That does help. I actually had a _Bulleted style, but I didn’t use it to change the default formatting of bullets, only to impose them at the style level. And it was seldom used even for that.
The ability to change bullet defaults would be a good thing to implement.
Thanks much for your help!
You’re quite welcome!
Format>Bullets & Numbering is a form of direct formatting. It is a contorted feature because it must not damage existing lists when you modify it to format a new one. Consequently its settings are never saved.
The only way to perpetuate your bullet or numbering preferences is to create a list style or to customise built-in ones. Once this is done, save your style collection in a template.
There are two ways to use list styles:
Outline & List tab) so that you only apply the paragraph style and you automatically get a list itemWow, that’s almost perfect. Somewhere deep in the recesses of my memory I was aware of List Styles, but had completely forgotten about them and why they were used. But the scheme makes sense, and what I particularly like about it is that the LS can be applied to any paragraph style, the same way I currently use the bullet function. Now I only have to figure out a macro that will toggle the LS property on and off, so I can hotkey my way to formatting, as I now do. Thanks much for this input!
Actually, removing a List Style by Macro is not so obvious. The Record Macro fails to pick up the Remove command from the Bullets and Numbering dialog, and I failed to find a uno: or other Basic reference online.
Lacking that, the list styling would have to be attached to a paragraph style, if that is possible. And that mean creating several new paragraph styles, which is not an ideal solution.
If your goal is “simply” a hotkey to apply a style, be it a list one or other, no need for a macro. Go to Tools>Customize, Keyboard tab. In Category, expand Styles and select List. Then find an available shortcut key and assign it the list style. Note that this shortcut is not toggling. You need another shortcut for No List to suppress the list property.
Then perhaps you have not thought deeply about the structure of your document. List items usually have a uniform formatting which means there is a single paragraph style. I make do with List 1 for bullet list and Numbering 1 for numbered lists. When I want some more complex formatting, mainly in relation with spacing (increased above at start of list and increased below at end of list), I set these variants in List 1 Start and List 1 End (same respectively for numbered list).
Remember also that lists in Writer are multi-level by default. This means you don’t need several paragraph styles to indent level 2 with regard to level 1, level 3 vs. level 2, … because the list style takes over paragraph style left indent. You can keep the same paragraph style over all levels.
The only case where you really need several paragraph styles attached to the same list style is when you want to mimic heading formatting (the Heading n family and Tools>Chapter Numbering).
Ok, excellent. That was the command I was looking for. In Macro world, it translates to
args1(0).Name = "On"
args1(0).Value = false
dispatcher.executeDispatch(document, ".uno:DefaultBullet", "", 0, args1())
Now if I can find a test for bullets being on, I can create a macro toggle.
Thanks again. 
As to the need for different paragraph styles with built-in list formatting, my docs often have both Normal and text_body paragraphs with bullets, depending on how densely spaced I want the paragraphs to be.