My friend Michelle was having issues transferring a document with footnotes from OpenOffice to Word. The issue was this: when a OpenOffice document is saved as a Word document, then opened in Word, the formatting of the footnotes is altered. This can be a really big problem if you are working on an academic paper.

Here is a workaround we found:

1. If possible, install the font you are using in Word in OpenOffice. Then use the same font in both programs (note: I haven’t found a simple solution for this yet)
2. Save the document in OpenOffice as a “rich-text” format (.rtf).
3. Open the “rich-text” format file in Word.
4. Re-save the file as a Word document (.doc). Then close the file.
5. Re-open the Word document.
   So, a quick re-cap:
   
   OpenOffice.rtf (rich-text format) >
   Word .rtf (rich-text format) >
   Word .doc (Word document) >
   Close document >
   Re-open document

6. By now, the footnotes should look pretty much the way they did in OpenOffice. If you need to do further formatting, go to Format> Reveal Formatting (Shift+F1)
7. Starting with the first footnote at the top, shift-select all of the footnotes.
8. In the “Reveal Formatting” panel on the right-hand side, click on whatever you need to change (this will probably be the “Indentation” link).
9. Review your results.