I can’t seem to link a paragraph style to the different levels and the only way I’ve managed to do this is to manually go through and assign a paragraph style to each. Which is a pain if you have a 200 page outline to change.
is there to a way to automate this so I can have something like level 1 as bold, level 2 as italics, etc?
We could probably use a bit more information about the situation you’re facing. Implicitly, it sounds like you have an existing document (native odt?) with consistent formatting to which you now wish to apply level/heading styles – is that right?
Are you setting levels for whole paragraphs? or simply headings? I can’t think of another way than using paragraph styles for this, but using styles certainly gives you your “level 1 as bold, level 2 as italics, etc.” Of course, if you’re creating a document, you can use these styles on the fly.
Applying these styles to your current document is more tricky. The best way I can think of is to use the AltSearch extension. How you might use this powerful but slightly complex extension to automate your conversions is another matter, and it would help if you could make a sample document available (Dropbox? Google drive?), or show us (screen capture?) what it is you’re working with.
This might not tell you anything you don’t already know, but adding more information might elicit higher quality help. 
Thanks for your help.
I worked out how to do this. For each level you to need to set a conditional style on whatever style you’re using for your list. For instance, I created a new paragraph style for my outline (called Outline), and another two paragraph styles for levels (I only wanted two. I called them Level 1 and Level 2). In the condition tag of the Outline style I applied Level 1 to 1st numbering level and Llevel 2 to numbering level 2.
Seems to work so far.