Following the instructions in the online Help document to the letter, e.g. 1. clicking within a manually formatted paragraph, 2. clicking on the First Line Indent style, and 3. clicking on Update selected style in Style Actions, I am still unable to update the Default paragraph First Line Indent style. I have tried clicking on the Autoupdate option in paragraph styles, but that doesn’t help either.
Am I wrong in assuming that by carrying out these actions in document A the update will carry over to Document B in the future?
Is your manually formatted paragraph initially on a different style ?
Can you try editing the style from the Style Manager (F11, right click on First Line Indent) and see if that works ?
The style dictionary is local to documents. It is initialised from the template upon which your document is based (a designated custom/default template or the “system” template as a fallback). When you modify a style, no matter if it is through Manage Styles or “Update selected”, the modification is recorded is the current document. Consequently, the modification is not forwarded to later documents.
If you want your changes to become permanent, you must either create them in the template or create a new template with your preferred style configuration.
In case, the changes are applied only to a handful of documents without any plan to use them on a wider scale, you can load styles from another document with the rightmost button in the style sidepane toolbar (Load Styles from Template then From File in the dialog).
I recommend you avoid using this command, especially if you have direct formatting, because the result depends on the position of the cursor and the amount of direct formatting. I find this procedure unreliable. Prefer explicit modification in the style dialog. You control very accurately all settings in a predictable way.