There is a document I am writing which has a lot of footnotes and I wondered if there is a way I can place the footnotes in two columns instead of stacking them under a single column. This, I think, both saves space and adds to beauty. Any ideas? As a matter of fact, I already looked at the options for Footnote under Paragraph Style, but failed to make it work. I include a screenshot which I hope will better make my point understood.
You can’t, sorry. The footnote area is part of the text area so the same formatting apply to it: no columns on the text area means no columns for the footnotes.
Of course you can do that on LaTeX (or XeTeX, if you need full unicode and opentype support) with the dblfnote package, but on Writer there is no automated way to do that (a workaround may be possible, but it would be too painful to be practical).