Footnote trouble-shooting

One of my colleagues had a great question about something I have encountered numerous times in MS Word 2007:

How do you change footnote spacing in a document? I noticed the spacing between the border and the actual text in the footer takes up a lot of space and I have no idea how to change or know if it’s a Word Standard.

HT: K. Ann Largie

---

In the process of trying to make Word work well for everyone, some of the folks at Microsoft must have gotten terribly distracted, because this problem happens on its own, persists in future documents, and is almost impossible to figure out how to fix.

Fortunately, it has caused me enough problem that I finally figured out how to correct the problem.

In case you have not seen this problem for yourself, I’ll try to create an example of it here on the blog.

A footnote in Word is supposed to look like this.

At the end of this statement, I would like to force you to skip to the bottom of the page to read more useless drivel¹.¶

 ¶

 ¶

 ¶

 ¶

 ¶

 ¶

---

¹ Here is a bunch of text to show you what the footnote would look like. I’m sure you’re intensely excited about this. As you should be.¶

But sometimes it ends up looking like this:

At the end of this statement, I would like to force you to skip to the bottom of the page to read more useless drivel¹.¶

 ¶

 ¶

 ¶

 ¶

 ¶

 ¶

---

¶
¶
¹ Here is a bunch of text to show you what the footnote would look like. I’m sure you’re intensely excited about this. As you should be.¶

Obviously, that’s not the way it’s supposed to work. But, try as you might, it seems impossible to remove the extra paragraph returns under the line. Word won’t even let you click into those extra paragraph returns.

But there is a way around it.

• Click on the View tab on Word’s Ribbon
• In the Document Views group, choose Draft
• Click on the References view in the Ribbon
• In the Footnotes group, choose Show Notes
• You may now access those pesky extra paragraph returns and delete them to remove that excess space

Now, switch back to normal Print View mode because the only thing the draft mode is good for is getting rid of those extra paragraph returns in the footnote area.