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.

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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
    2015-07-04T00:38:39+00:00

    My issue seems to match exactly what is described in the original post.  Nothing in the subsequent posts worked for me either, not even the other website link to another page (which was interesting nonetheless).

    BUT... I ended up hitting ENTER at the last line of text before the big white space and that made the next line come up to the current page.

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  2. Anonymous
    2015-05-12T15:30:50+00:00

    I dealt with the same issue and discovered what was causing the problem in my document.  Word was forcing substantial blank space at the bottom of a page.  The top of the next page had a paragraph with five citations.  Rather than place the paragraph and some of the footnotes at the bottom of the previous page, Word forced the paragraph and all footnotes to the next page.  I changed the paragraph to a bulleted list of cited material.  The first two bullets and the first two footnotes then moved to the bottom of the previous page.

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  3. Suzanne S Barnhill 279.4K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2015-02-11T23:45:49+00:00

    It is not necessary to use a method that is "finicky." Once you are in Draft view, you can use References | Footnotes | Show Notes to open the Footnotes pane.

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  4. Anonymous
    2015-02-11T20:13:31+00:00
    1. Switch into draft view (View ->Draft).
    2. Hover your mouse above any footnote in the main text, and double click. A split window should appear, with your footnotes listed in it. It's finicky, so you might need to click a few times to make it appear.
    3. At the top, there's a drop-down menu set to "All footnotes". Switch to footnote separator. Edit to fix the problem.

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