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
    2016-07-26T01:18:13+00:00

    I am also having the same issue as @jobbins. Help!

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  2. Suzanne S Barnhill 279.4K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2016-05-14T20:12:58+00:00

    The most likely cause is extra space (probably empty paragraphs) added to the Footnote Separator. How you access this to fix it will depend on what version you're using:

    Word 2003 and earlier: In Normal view, click View | Footnotes.

    Word 2007 and later: Switch to Draft view. On the References tab, in the Footnotes group, click Show Notes.

    Once you have the Footnotes pane open, select Footnote Separator from the dropdown on the toolbar. Display nonprinting characters (Ctrl+*) so you can see paragraph marks. If there are empty paragraphs, delete them. If the problem is Spacing After, the easiest way to get rid of it is to click Reset (this will actually get rid of extra paragraphs as well).

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  3. Anonymous
    2016-05-14T18:08:57+00:00

    None of this helped me. Here's a screenshot of my document, with the massive footnote boxes.

    They're taking up literally double the space they should do :(

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  4. Stefan Blom 352.7K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2016-03-27T13:29:13+00:00

    Note that the "Below text" option for footnotes is discussed in Suzanne S. Barnhill's article at http://wordfaqs.mvps.org/BottomLine.htm (previously linked to in this thread).

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