MS Word: Moving cursor through text and footnotes

I swear that it used to be that when I split a window so that when I moved the cursor through the text in the top window, the bottom window would automatically move to the relevant footnotes and vice versa, but I can’t figure out how to make it do that now. Any ideas.

View > Footnotes should do it for you.

That just seems to take the selected window to the footnotes. It doesn’t seem to do the “follow the cursor” trick.

Hm. Weird. What version of Word?

I tried splitting the screen and using the Object Browser (and I had to browse by endnote instead of footnote), but that also just jumped within the individual screen.

Were you perhaps thinking of comments? I know that you can jump through comments that way.

My SOP is to strip out footnotes/endnotes to straight text, so I don’t normally work with Word note functions.

Make sure you’re in Normal, and not Page Layout, View. This can be done either from the View menu, or (in my version of Word which is probably not yours, now that I think about it) the bottom left-hand corner of the document window has a button that looks like a bunch of horizontal lines with no square around it - click that.

Then the View Footnotes command should give you a split window.

That works for me in Word 2003. How about you, acsenray?

That’s it! It has to be in “normal” view. Thanks. Now when I advance through the document, the second window automatically jumps to the relevant footnote.

I would prefer working in normal view anyway, except that the “track changes” goes in-text instead of to the margins. So I guess this trick isn’t going to work for me.

Sigh.

Point of curiosity: Why don’t you like seeing track changes inline?

(I hate the stupid balloons, especially with heavy edits. Plus when you print them out, the whole page gets reduced to accommodate them. Yuck.)

If everything stays inline – old and new versions – it makes it much more difficult to read. I’m concerned with improving what’s on the page now. It’s seldom I need to know what used to be on the page and in such rare cases, the balloons work just fine.

Plus, keeping old text inline messes with the pagination, line splitting, page breaks, position of non-text objects, etc.

I don’t really have to look at them. That’s someone else’s problem. And if they don’t like it, they can change it to normal view.

I only take printouts before I start editing.

Ah. I do need to see changes, and I don’t like to see deletions either. So I set insertions to blue underline, and deletions to light gray strikeout. That way the eye skips over them much more easily.

Yeah, that’s one of the drawbacks too. It’s moot for me because I edit in 14-pt. Verdana, whereas the client is going to get 12-pt. TNR or whatever.

Sometimes I have to do hard-copy edits on pages with balloons, with edits from the author and/or earlier editors/reviewers. Yucko!

Forgive me if you know this one, but you can also specify that you’d like to view the “Final” version of the doc, rather than “Final Showing Markup” - in my version of Word this is a dropdown menu on the leftmost side of the Reviewing Toolbar. Choosing “Final” causes all changes to disappear and you can see what things look like at the mo. It also is handy for producing a printout without having the page all reduced and balloon-filled, which you were rightfully hating on, Scarlett67.

I also usually work without Track Changes showing (Final view), because I’m familiar enough with TC that I know what it looks like. That drawback comes when other people may want to see inline TC and you haven’t been neat about it; sometimes changes can get funky and hard to follow if you’re doing them blind. So if I’m not sure how the tracking looks, I switch back and forth (via hotkeys to make it quick) so I can check.