In OpenOffice Writer there is currently no way to manage the padding in tables 
through styles. If handling large documents with many tables, each table cell 
has a hard formatted spacing from the cell borders. This cannot easily be 
changed through the whole document.

One solution might be to use the border/frame styles for table cells as well, 
which is currently not possible to my knowledge.

Another solution might be the specilize the document configuration feature 
"compatibility": There is an option to use paragraph spacing at the beginning 
of a page/table cell. While many users prefer not to use paragraph margins at 
page top/bottom, they may require the margin in tables (but maybe not in all 
tables). Therefore activating/deactiviating the feature per table might be the 
second solution.