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Fixing bullet problems in Open Office

January 1, 2010 By Chris Corrigan Uncategorized 14 Comments

If you are a user of OpenOffice on the Mac, like I am, you have probably noticed that in converting documents back and forth between .odt and .doc formats messes with your bullets.  Instead of little dots, you get clapper boards, which are cute but not useful for a professional documents.

Today, buried deep in a page discussing this bug, I found a very useful manual fix that has worked for me:

“I’ve had success using the Font Replacement Table, located in the  OpenOffice.org ->Fonts.  Enable “Apply replacement table”, select “Symbol” in the lefthand FONT drop  down, select “OpenSymbol” in the righthand “Replace with” dropdown. Press the  checkmark to the right to add the substitution to the table. Make sure you check  the Always box.

Once this is set up, opening and saving in MSWord 97/XP format preserves the  bullet characters in both directions.”

Hope this helps you.

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14 Comments

  1. Troels Axelsen says:
    January 17, 2010 at 4:51 am

    Thanks! I find OpenOffice .doc support to be bearable at best. But this certainly helps a lot.

  2. benjamin says:
    April 23, 2010 at 12:24 am

    Thanks a lot! It works 🙂

  3. Gervais says:
    May 11, 2010 at 9:05 am

    Brilliant, thank you so much

  4. Danny Staple says:
    June 19, 2010 at 2:08 am

    Thanks for that – definitely helped me out. I’ve added a link to it on my computer tips page at http://www.squidoo.com/dannyscomputertips. I think it is the first Mac tip I’ve put on there so far!

  5. Ty says:
    February 5, 2011 at 11:29 am

    Finally! A solution to this annoying problem! I’m excited and it did work. Thank you so much.

  6. Peishan says:
    June 17, 2011 at 1:56 am

    Thanks heaps! I wonder why they have not yet fixed this problem but thanks so much for the workaround!

  7. Prater says:
    August 21, 2011 at 10:40 am

    This solution will not work

    In version 3.3 on a mac go to

    1. Format
    2. Bullet and Numbering
    3. Options
    4. drop box for numbering select bullet
    5. Character
    6. Select Open Symbol

    Currently it uses WingDing which messes up MS office in the doc format.

  8. Carolyn Andrews says:
    November 17, 2012 at 6:40 pm

    Hi Chris, could you please help me? When I use bullets, I generally don’t want them indented, and I prefer only a small space between the bullet and the text – how do I set this up as the default? I love Open Office but the bullets drive me mad!

    Many thanks,

    Carolyn

  9. Melissa says:
    January 21, 2013 at 4:14 am

    Brilliant. Worked like a charm. Thanks!!

  10. ellie says:
    January 24, 2013 at 7:27 am

    When I set the small bullets for the ones points I want to mark/bullet, the larger ones will show up, not always but randomly enough, and space my lines out accordingly, so that my document looks bad. How do I tell it to just use the ‘small’ bullets I have selected and nothing else? Thanks so much for your help. I’m going crazy about this.

  11. Eliza says:
    February 3, 2013 at 4:28 pm

    Thanks!!! Worked perfectly, and also fixed the problem of the bullets changing into clocks (!) when exporting to PDF.

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