Hi everyone,




In the book I'm revising, I've inserted about 2,200 footnotes. Some footnotes describe sources. Others cite Bible passages. Since Word puts each footnote on a separate line, I need to arrange biblical footnotes horizontally to shorten the document. Will Word 2019 tell my computer how to do that or do I need to move biblical footnote numbers by hand? If Word will make the computer to arrange them horizontally, how do I make it do that? If I have to arrange them by hand, how can I do that efficiently?


Thank you for your help.

You can change the arrangement of footnotes into columns at the bottom of the page. If they are mostly short, this can save substantial room.

Mr. Kenyon, thank you. A friend of mine suggested a complex way to rearrange them. So I think you may have saved me plenty of time. So I'll tell you what happens when I try to arrange the footnote numbers into rows.

After I rearranged some footnote numbers at the bottom of a page, unwanted carriage returns stayed where the footnotes had been. So now the footnotes seem too far from the next page. What can I do to delete those CRs?

When I used the "menu" you posted and applied my choices to the whole document, the already-inserted footnotes stayed put. To me, that suggests that to make the computer arrange footnote numbers in three columns, I need reinsert the footnotes after I say how many columns I want.

Try converting to EndNotes and back.
It may be that your Footnotes are not "Word footnotes" but came in from some other program.

That functionality did not exist in Office 2011, which the OP's profile indicates is in use.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

What version of Office are you using? Your profile indicates Office 2011. If it's not that, please update your profile to indicate the correct version.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

I run Word 2011 and Word 2019. I'll try to change the profile, too, because I'm an Apple guy instead of a PC one.

I'm still having trouble getting Word to arrange footnotes into three columns. So I deleted each footnote from a version of my document, chose the three-column option from the menu, and saved the document. Do I need to do anything else to make the footnotes fill the columns when I type those notes?

If they are true footnotes, you shouldn't have to do any of that. Are you saving the document in the docx format?

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Yes, I am saving it in docx format. But the computer warned me about a possible incompatibility when I may have told it to ignore that problem.
I forget the exact words the computer warned me with. But it told me that since my document included formatting that other versions of Word don't support, I ight want to save the document in another format instead of the docx format.

The footnotes probably are true footnotes because I insert them with the option I find when I click the "References" tab.

AFAIK, there is no formatting in Word not supported in the .docx format. There is formatting not supported by Word 2011 from later versions of Word. Paul knows more about this than I do.

Maybe he does, but you know much more than I know about it. He does, too. I'm a programmer and a Unix guy, not an expert in Microsoft software.


Anyhow, after the computer warned me, read a list of document formats suggesting that doc and docx are the only formats I can use for my current project.

Keep the .docx format.
The Windows version has the option to update the file format unde File > Info. I do not know whether or not tha Mac does, especially in 2011.

Whenever MS introduces new features, they only apply to current & future releases, not to earlier ones.

This was true even with the .doc format. With Word 2000, for example, MS introduced the centring property for tables, which was not available in Word 97 (which require you to calculate your own centring). With Word 2010, MS introduced the checkbox content control, which is not supported by Word 2007, and so on. While Word 2000 and 2010 documents can be opened in Word 97 and 2007, they can't take advantage of formatting etc. created in the later version for which they never had any support.

The same is true of multi-column footnotes; they'll only be seen in Word 2016 and later (IIRC), not in Word 2013 & earlier. And, if you use Word 2013 & earlier edit a document that originally had multi-column footnotes, I'd expect that formatting to be lost when the document is subsequently re-opened in Word 2016 and later.

Microsoft helpfully includes a warning if you're about to take the document out of compatibility mode so as to employ a feature that isn't supported in earlier versions. Dismiss that, and you won't be able to use the feature.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]