Converting Citations from Chicago to APA Style

Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated December 27, 2025)
This tip applies to Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, 2021, 2024, and Word in Microsoft 365

Ivan has a 35-page document that includes just over 175 footnotes. The citations in each footnote were created in Chicago style, but he just found out that he needs to convert them to APA style. Ivan wonders if there is an easy way to do this.

Getting citations in the correct style is one of the most detailed, arduous tasks involved in creating an academic paper. For instance, in the Chicago Manual of Style (eighteenth edition), the chapters comprising the rules and examples for formatting citations occupy 178 pages. That's a lot to understand and get your head around.

Because of complexity such as this, there is no automatic (aka "easy") way to do such a style conversion in Word. There are some online tools that might help, though. Ones such as CiteThisForMe.com and Scribbr.com may be helpful, but you would still need to copy and paste each Chicago citation into the tool and then paste the APA version back into the footnote. Each citation would need to go through this copy-and-paste round trip, plus you will need to double-check each converted citation to make sure nothing went awry.

Like I said, this is not an easy process. If you decide to go through the process, you may want to keep two versions of your final paper—one using Chicago citations and one using APA citations.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (5942) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, 2021, 2024, 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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What is 2 - 2?

2025-12-27 04:33:13

R. Paquette

If Ivan had used the references tab to record each citation, then converting from Chicago to APA would be easy! This is also essential if you wish to automatically generate a bibliography at the end of your academic paper. To change styles in the references tab, choose a new style from the drop down menu. Then update the document.

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