Major Footnote Problems

[ogewsa]

Inherited a Word document I have to update, with many footnote problems:



I. Footnotes restart numbering many times in the 150-page document. Sometimes with a new page, sometimes just randomly.

II. Footnotes will skip numbers. E.g. Footnote is followed by Footnote 200.

III. When I use the Insert Footnote functionality in the middle of the text, it: 1) places the footnote in the right "order" in the bottom of the page, but 2) does so without the same indentation, font, etc. , and 3) with the footnote number "1." The footnotes numbers all around it are not altered.

IV. When I use the Footnote dialog box to change the Numbering to Continuous for the whole document, it mostly works for the footnote lists at the bottom of each page. BUT, the footnote numbers in the main text remain unaltered.

[Guessed]

I) If footnotes are restarting, most likely reason is presence of Section Breaks and the footnotes are being told to restart at a section break.

II) Generally when numbers are skipped it is because there are tracked revisions and footnotes 'marked for deletion' are still in the document. Fix is to accept tracked revisions.

III-2) Most likely the indentation, font etc was customised by the previous authors. There is a style for footnotes (Footnote Text) which should be modified to your preferences and you should remove local formatting from existing footnotes so that it matches the style.

IV) When changing the numbering to continuous, pay careful attention to the 'Apply changes to' option. It should be set to Whole document if that is what you wanted to happen.