I’m doing a long document in Word, and the way it handles footnotes is irritating me. The text of the footnote is not appearing on the same page as the footnote number. I might insert a footnote on p. 3, and the text of it shows on the bottom of p. 4 or 5.
Can anyone tell me a way to keep the text on the same page as the footnote number?
Thanks.
That’s a common issue with footnotes, Word or not. If the footnote is in the final paragraph, there’s not enough space at the bottom of the page for the footnote without moving the footnote reference to the next page. Word probably puts it on the next page if the footnote can’t fit on the page with the reference.
It requires some tweaking. One thing that may help is to turn off widows and orphans control.
Well, I’ve not run into this problem with WordPerfect, which I normally use for big papers. It handles big footnotes and keeping them with the text just fine. Unfortunately, the call for papers specified Word, which I’m not so familiar with, hence my post.
So the only way to fix this problem in Word is to allow widows and orphans? seems rather primitive.
I have not had this problem with Word, but I usually use end notes rather than footnotes. However, **RealityChuck **describes something that would seem like a catch-22 for any program. If a reference is near the bottom of the page, then adding the footnote to the bottom would bump the reference to the next page. But if you force the reference to the top of the following page (such as with a manual page break) then you end up with white space at the bottom of the original page.
How does WordPerfect deal with this?
The other thing you might try is to compose your paper in WordPerect, then when you’re done, open it in Word and save in Word format. However, I don’t know if the footnotes will convert over as desired, although conversion of footnotes is supported. (I have Word 2003 and it can open WordPerfect 5.x and 6.x documents though some more esoteric features are not supported.)
I just tried to force what you describe in Word and I could not create a situation with a footnote reference on one page and the footnote on another page. Not to say that I don’t believe you, but either Word is buggy (surprise, surprise) or you have a special situation that can be somehow mitigated.
I don’t know - it just does, and I’ve not had to worry about this issue.
It’s on my work computer, so I’ll try tinkering with widow/orphan controls when I go in later today. I may also have “keep with next” turned on, which might be affecting it somehow.
Versions of MSWord earlier than Word 2003 had known problems with footnotes. If you’re using MSWord 2003, make sure your compatibility options are set for MSWord 2003. Click “Tools” on the top menu, then “Options” from the drop-down menu, then in the box labeled “Recommended options for:”, make sure Microsoft Office Word 2003 is chosen. That may help.
If not, or if you’re using an earlier version, I’ve found that specifing space (say, 10 points, depending on the font size) after the “Footnote Text” paragraph style helps.
thanks - I’ll try that tomorrow at work.
Well, I seem to have it fixed, sort of.
I had to do “select all” for the text of the document to turn off widows/orphans and “keep with next”.
Then, I had to create a new style for the footnotes to turn off widows/orphans and “keep with next” in the footnotes themselves, because doing “select all” for the document apparently did not alter the formatting for the footnotes.
So now the footnotes are generally on the right page, but I’ve got single lines here and there in the main text at the top or bottom of the page.
Screw it. I’ll let the publishers try to make sense of it, and will go back to Word Perfect for my daily work.