How can I remove the space above the footnote separator?

Anonymous
2012-03-10T06:23:19+00:00

I have a long document with many footnotes. On some pages, a large space, sometimes only enough for one double-spaced line, sometimes enough for two, appears above the footnote separator. How can I get rid of this space? I've turned widow-orphan control off, so it shouldn't be related to that. I've looked at the separator under "show notes" in draft view, and it doesn't appear to have any extra spaces associated with it. This actually happens with all of my Word documents.

Thanks for your insight.

Microsoft 365 and Office | Word | For home | Windows

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Stefan Blom 352.7K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
2012-03-10T13:52:16+00:00

When viewing the footnote separator (in the footnotes pane), right-click and select Paragraph from the context menu. In the Paragraph dialog box, click the Indents and Spacing tab, and make sure that Spacing Before is set to zero. You may also want to change the Line Spacing to "Single."

Also, to make sure no blank paragraphs is included with the separator, click the ¶ button on the Home tab. Paragraph marks are represented by pilcrows, ¶. Delete any excessive paragraphs if present.

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  1. Anonymous
    2016-09-21T09:56:57+00:00

    Hi, 

    I had the same problem, and this solved it:

    1. Go to the View tab, then choose Draft.
    2. Go to the References tab and click Show Footnotes. (On Macs, go to View> Footnotes – thanks to commenter Gerard for spotting this)
    3. In the drop-down list that appears in the Footnotes area, choose Footnote Separato r.
    4. Delete any extra spaces, carriage returns etc. It’s handy to have “show non-printing characters” switched on.
    5. Repeat for the other one – I think it was Continuous Footnote Separator.
    6. Go back to View and switch back to Print Layout.

    Source:

    https://krysjez.wordpress.com/2010/09/25/quick-fix-space-before-footnotes-in-ms-word/

    Good luck!

    Eugenio

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  2. Suzanne S Barnhill 279.4K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2013-10-03T12:37:09+00:00

    The reason this had not previously been mentioned in the thread was that the OP said he had already done this, and there was no space above the separator. For more on note separators, see http://WordFAQs.mvps.org/NoteSeparators.htm.

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  3. Anonymous
    2013-10-12T23:35:43+00:00

    Thank You!

    Following the steps in http://WordFAQs.mvps.org/NoteSeparators.htm finally took care of a problem of returns preceding my footnote - turned out to be a separator issue that I could resolve by simply deleting the returns.  Unfortunately, you have to know to go into draft, and which entries to click.  I wasted way too much time on trying to fix the problem.

    Why is it so difficult to format footnotes?

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  4. Stefan Blom 352.7K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2013-08-01T23:19:52+00:00

    Did you read Suzanne's article at http://wordfaqs.mvps.org/BottomLine.htm?

    Also, remember that if you want to turn off widows and orphans for (every page of) an entire document, you will have to modify the Normal style (or whatever style you are using for the body text of your document).

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