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.