Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated April 16, 2025)
This tip applies to Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and 2021
Footnotes are used quite often in some types of documents, such as scholarly papers or those where it is important to document supporting information. If you have a footnote whose text you want to move into the main body of the document—and thereby do away with the footnote—then you typically follow these steps:
Doing this once or twice is OK; doing it many times can be a pain. The solution to make the process faster is to use a macro. The following macro essentially automates the above steps:
Sub MoveFootnote() If Selection.Footnotes.Count = 1 Then Selection.Footnotes(1).Range.Copy Selection.Collapse direction:=wdCollapseStart Selection.Paste Selection.MoveRight Unit:=wdCharacter, Count:=1, Extend:=wdExtend Selection.Delete Unit:=wdCharacter, Count:=1 End If End Sub
In order to use the macro, select the footnote reference before you run it. The macro checks to make sure that there is a single footnote reference in the selection. If there is, it copies the footnote text, pastes it in front of the footnote reference, and then deletes the footnote reference. The result is that you move the footnote text into the document at the same point where the footnote reference used to be.
Note:
WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (8930) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and 2021. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Word here: Moving Footnote Text into the Document.
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