Resolving Tracked Changes in Footnotes or Endnotes

Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated August 12, 2023)
This tip applies to Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, 2021, and Word in Microsoft 365

Leo wonders if, in a document with tracked changes, there is a way to accept or reject only the changes that appear in the footnotes or endnotes.

In general, you can accept or reject tracked changes in a portion of your document by first selecting that portion and then doing the accepting or rejecting. Thus, to perform the task in the footnotes or endnotes you could do the following:

Click once within either your endnotes or footnotes. The point is to make sure that the insertion point is within the endnotes or footnotes themselves.
Press Ctrl+A. This selects all the footnotes or endnotes. (If this action selects your entire document, you didn't make sure that the insertion point was within the footnotes or endnotes in step 1.)
Display the Review tab of the ribbon.
Click the down-arrow next to the either the Accept or Reject tools, depending on whether you want to accept or reject the changes. Word displays a list of options for the tool.
Choose Accept Change or Reject Change, depending on which tool you chose in step 3. Word accepts or rejects all the changes in the endnotes or footnotes.

You'll want to make sure in steps 5 that you choose the correct option. If you choose one of the Accept All Changes or Reject All Changes options, by mistake, you'll actually get rid of all the changes in the entire document, which is not what you want to do.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (266) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, 2021, and Word in Microsoft 365.

Author Bio

Allen Wyatt

With more than 50 non-fiction books and numerous magazine articles to his credit, Allen Wyatt is an internationally recognized author. He is president of Sharon Parq Associates, a computer and publishing services company. Learn more about Allen...

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