My apologies. Thank you for asking. I shall fix the thread title as well as the description in the first post. This thread is about a paragraph marker that has made its way in between the first footnote and the line separator which separates the footnotes from the general text of the page. On pages on which there is no footnote, all the formatting is perfect. On pages on which there are footnotes, there is a large paragraph marker which raises up the line separator, and even when I show all the paragraph markers, Word does not allow me to bring my curser to this paragraph marker and delete it.

The footers are fine. There is no problem with the footers.

What that indicates is that you've added an extra paragraph break to the footnote separator. To access that, switch to Draft view, then choose:
References>Show Notes>Footnotes:Footnote Separator
then delete all paragraph breaks till you're left with just one - which can't be deleted.

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

Perfect! Worked like a charm. Thank you!!!

(I am just curious as to how one does a thing i.e. how does one "add an extra paragraph break to the footnote separator"? I don't think I could do that if I tried. It happened when my colleague was working with the file, and I would be quite interested to understand so I can explain to him how to avoid doing so in the future.)

Your colleague most likely accessed the Footnote Separator as described above and pressed the <Enter> key.

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

Ok, many thanks. I would be surprised if that happened, as he only works in Print layout mode. But I suppose inadvertently something like that could have happened. Anyhow now it is fixed, and we know how to fix it in the future as well. That is the main thing.