Changing the Font in Footnotes

Vivian has a document that includes footnotes. If she uses Find and Replace to change all instances of Times New Roman to Aptos, Word only finds occurrences in the main body of the document. It won't find TNR text in footnotes, even if she places the insertion point in the footnotes before doing the search. Vivian wonders what causes this behavior and how she can change fonts within footnotes using Find and Replace.

Using Microsoft 365 on a Windows system, I could not duplicate what Vivian is experiencing. That tells me that she is using an older version of Word and experiencing an issue that may have been resolved in the latest version.

I'm going to assume that Vivian is searching for instances where TNR has been applied explicitly in footnote text and that she wants to change those instances to Aptos. Further, I'll assume that Aptos is the font specified in the Footnote Text style and is, therefore, the default font in Vivian's document.

One potential approach is to place the insertion point in a footnote and then press Ctrl+A. This selects all the footnotes and then Vivian could press Ctrl+Spacebar to return all the footnotes to the default font specified in the Footnote Text style (presumably Aptos). There is a huge drawback to this approach, however—it removes all explicit formatting, not just the instances of TNR. In other words, if you have book titles italicized in your footnotes, all of the italics are removed. Also, all of the footnote references (the numbers at the beginning of each footnote) are set back to the Footnote Text style instead of the Footnote Reference style.

A better solution is to use Find and Replace, but there are some very specific steps you need to go through to make sure it works properly:

1. Press Ctrl+H. Word displays the Replace tab of the Find and Replace dialog box.
2. Click the More button, if it is available. Word expands the Find and Replace dialog box to show more options.
3. Make sure that both the Find What and Replace With boxes are empty.
4. Position the insertion point in the Find What box.
5. Click the Format button and then choose Font. Word displays the Find Font dialog box.
6. Using the controls in the dialog box, indicate what font characteristics you want to search for. In Vivian's case, this means just changing the Font drop-down to Times New Roman.
7. Click on OK to dismiss the Find Font dialog box. Whatever you specified in step 6 should appear just below the Find What box.
8. Switch to the Find tab of the Find and Replace dialog box. Your font setting should still appear below the Find What box.
9. Using the Find In drop-down list, choose Footnotes.
10. Switch back to the Replace tab of the Find and Replace dialog box.
11. Position the insertion point in the Find What box.
12. Click the Format button and then choose Font. Word displays the Replace Font dialog box.
13. Using the controls in the dialog box, indicate what font characteristics you want to replace with. In Vivian's case, this means just changing the font drop-down to Aptos.
14. Click on OK to dismiss the Replace Font dialog box. Whatever you specified in step 13 should appear just below the Replace With box.
15. Use either the Replace All button to change all instances or use the Find Next and Replace buttons to step through the possible changes.

The key to making this work is steps 8 through 10. It is these that indicate you want to search in the footnotes and not in the main body of the document. (It is very odd that Microsoft chose to not place a "Find In" drop-down on the Replace tab of the dialog box.)

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (7401) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, 2021, 2024, and Word in Microsoft 365.