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. Stefan Blom 352.7K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2016-09-21T18:05:20+00:00

    For "everything" on note separators, see MVP Suzanne S. Barnhill's article at http://wordfaqs.mvps.org/NoteSeparators.htm.

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  2. 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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  3. Suzanne S Barnhill 279.4K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2016-08-12T23:06:58+00:00

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  4. Stefan Blom 352.7K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2016-08-12T19:43:36+00:00

    In my case, the problem of wasted space above the separator was caused by the line-spacing that was set by default for the separator itself, which was 23.75 pts. One I changed that to single spacing, like the text of the footnote itself, the wasted space disappeared.

    By default, the Normal paragraph style is applied to the Footnote Separator, which means that many of the settings of that style will be applied to the separator as well.

    For a long-term solution, avoid modifying the Normal style and, instead, use the Body Text style for the text in the main body of the document.

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