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
    2013-12-19T21:20:41+00:00

    Hi, I had the same exact problem as was able to correct the issue for the most part by selecting Paragraph from the Format drop-down menu and unchecking the "Don't add space between paragraphs of the same style"

    This is sort of counter-intuitive, because I would have thought that having the box checked would have the effect that unchecking it had on the document, but maybe it's a result of bad coding on the part of Microsoft.

    Anyway, more or less fixed the problem for me, so hopefully it will help you too.

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  2. Anonymous
    2013-12-07T13:28:57+00:00

    I simply copied the number of the footnote from another piece of my work, held my cursor next to the previous footnote (which does not have the double spacing) and pasted.

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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. 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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