Bullet Point Characters Incorrect for Word Documents in OpenOffice Mac

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May 17

Bullet Point Characters Incorrect for Word Documents in OpenOffice Mac

Just a very small post here because I had trouble finding a solution myself. Users of OpenOffice for the Mac may experience odd-looking bullet point characters when opening and saving MS Word .doc files. The character looks like a W inside a box.

Anyway, the problem is due to MS Office not encoding the character correctly when saving the file, but the temporary solution is to use OpenOffice’s Font Replacement feature (see Preferences), to replace “Symbol” with “OpenSymbol".

Let’s hope there’s some resolution in future, my guess is that the open document formats will just see this issue disappear in time. Here’s a thread that explains the problem, and the solution, in more depth:

http://user.services.openoffice.org/en/forum/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=10846

5 comments

§ J.Colin said on : 25/08/09 @ 10:06
Thank you, thank you, thank you !
I got stuck with that several month ago and I couldn't find any solution on the OOo forums. I'm really happy I finally found your post.
§ Tomas Jablonski said on : 02/09/09 @ 21:35
Thanks for taking the time to post this for the benefit of all OO/mac users. It was a great time saver, because it replaced manually changing all bullets to a different type.
§ Bruce said on : 30/09/09 @ 18:24
Actually the problem's source is not exactly as described as I can take a Word 2003 doc file that prints the bullets perfectly on a PC running XP and open the file on a Mac and I lose the bullets and cannot print them from the same document. MS Word just does not properly handle bullets in documents.
§ Darran Edmundson said on : 19/11/09 @ 05:49
Richard, echoing the above ... thank you. This tip is going to save me 30 minutes a week in lost productivity - time previously spent manually converting the bullet points in .doc files supplied by our client. This problem was causing me such grief that I even investigated hiring an OO developer to solve it in the source ... no need now, that $1k can be spent elsewhere.
§ tom said on : 08/12/09 @ 08:36
Thank you very much!
I have no idea how much time this problem cost me. Only to find out that after you save an opened .doc file the bullets are converted "back" again!!!
Wow, thank you sooooo much!