How can I remove the space above the footnote separator?

Anonymous

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 MVP Volunteer Moderator

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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55 additional answers

Anonymous

2015-08-04T16:26:08+00:00

FYI, in Word 2013, "Normal" View seems to be called "Draft." From there, same procedure: double-click the footnote number in the text, select Footnote Separator, delete or reformat the paragraph markers between the separator line, and voila!
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Stefan Blom 352.7K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator

2015-07-05T00:03:08+00:00

Good point. Anyway, Jessie's post certainly illustrates that resurrecting an old thread may not be a good idea.
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Suzanne S Barnhill 279.4K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator

2015-07-04T15:52:51+00:00

I thought that perhaps what Jessie was saying was that she pressed Enter to split a paragraph that was sticking together, though that doesn't exactly match the description, either.
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Stefan Blom 352.7K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator

2015-07-04T13:56:28+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.

If the problem was excessive blank spacing at the bottom of the page, the explanation could be that some paragraphs were formatted as "Keep with next" (Paragraph dialog box) which would force them onto the next page. There is really no way to tell what has happened unless you enable the display of nonprinting marks and also look at the Paragraph options for paragraphs in the affected part of the document.

Pressing Enter repeatedly (if that is what you did) isn't a long-term solution, because it adds blank paragraphs to the document.
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