[soilwork]

Ah, that is what you mean. Hmm, I have not figured out search & replace method, but I just tried the following and it seems to work.

First, convert the Word file into html using 'File - Save As - Save Type As: Web page'.
Second, open the html with web browser (e.g. Firefox) and copy and paste the content back to Word with the 'Automatic bulleted lists' option unchecked.

Actually, if you are interested in converting the document into epub, maybe you can skip the second step and directly convert html to epub. [Edit]. I am attaching epub document made by Word -> html -> epub (using any2epub).