MS Word Tip – Are your footnotes disappearing?
- January 24th, 2010
- Posted in MS Excel & Word Tips
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You are having a problem with the footnotes disappearing in a document. You can view them in Normal view, but also need to view them in Page Layout view so you can ultimately print them out.
A few things to check.
First, you should check the obvious formatting-related issues. Are some of your footnotes formatted as Hidden text? If they are and you have Word configured to not print Hidden text, the footnotes will not be visible in Print Preview.
Next, you will want to check to make sure that Track Changes isn’t turned on. If it is, there’s a chance that you’ve actually deleted some of your footnotes. They may still be visible in some views of your document, but wouldn’t be visible in Print Preview if you are looking at the “final” document with markup taken into account.
If you still can’t see them, you should also not assume that what you see in Print Layout view is equivalent to what you will see when you actually print your document. Take a look at your document in Print Preview and see if your footnotes all show up there. It is not uncommon to have discrepancies between what is displayed in Print Layout view and what shows up in Print Preview.
Also, if the text of your document is within a large table in which a single table row extends for several pages, that may be the problem. Word defers any footnotes in the row to the page where the row ends. If the row ends so close to the bottom of the page that there is not room for all the footnotes, instead of being carried to the next page, the footnotes are just ignored. Try to break up the row into several rows.
It’s also possible, if the footnotes are long, that the length of the footnotes are overpowering the page. There are some limitations to the amount of room that Word would leave for footnotes.



