Not web related, but if you’ve found this post on Google you’ll know how frustrating it is. On Mac versions of Open Office 3.0, bullet points are interpreted incorrectly from Word documents.

It’s actually a problem with the way bullets are encoded with Word, compounded by the way the Symbol font set works on mac. But, there’s a fix.

All you need to do is substitute the Symbol font set with OpenSymbol. To do so, follow these steps:

1. Go to preferences
2. OpenOffice.org > Fonts
3. Check "Apply replacement table"
4. In the left box, select Symbol, in the right box select OpenSymbol.
5. Press the green tick, and select "Always"
6. Save and you are done.

You can now open and save word document with bullets with ease. 

We are big fans of Open Source software. Google Docs is great for collaboration and reading most types of document – but absolutely rubbish for creating documents to be printed. Open Office is great too, but niggles like this worry us. Still, at least this time around there’s a fix.

Ben