Replacing Asterisks with a Footnote

Steve has a document that contains quite a few URLs. He's tested all the URLs to make sure they are valid, and the ones that are not valid he has appended with an asterisk. Now Steve would like to go back and replace all those asterisks with a footnote that simply says, "No longer there." He wonders if there is an easy way to do this for all the asterisks in the document.

There are two ways to approach this. The first relies on using Find and Replace. You can follow these general steps:

1. Go to your first asterisk and replace it with the footnote you want to use.
2. Select the footnote reference mark (the one in the main text) and press Ctrl+C. This copies the footnote to the Clipboard.
3. Press Ctrl+H to display the Replace tab of the Find and Replace dialog box.
4. In the Find What box, enter an asterisk.
5. In the Replace With box, enter ^c (it must be a lowercase c).
6. Click Replace All.

What you end up with is all the asterisks replaced with the footnotes. Realize that all of the asterisks in your document are replaced. If you have some asterisks that you don't want replaced, then you can step through matches and replace or not replace them individually.

The other way you can approach the issue is by using a macro. This is particularly helpful if you need to make the replacements in multiple documents. The following example macro searches through the document for asterisks, then deletes the asterisks and inserts the desired footnote.

Sub ReplaceAsterisksWithFootnotes()
    Dim rng As Range

    Set rng = ActiveDocument.Content
    With rng.Find
        .Text = "*"
        .Replacement.Text = ""
        .Forward = True
        .Wrap = wdFindStop
        .Format = 0
        .MatchCase = 0
        .MatchWholeWord = 0
        .MatchWildcards = 0
        .MatchSoundsLike = 0
        .MatchAllWordForms = 0
    End With
    Do While rng.Find.Execute
        rng.Delete
        ActiveDocument.Footnotes.Add Range:=rng, Text:="No longer there."
    Loop
End Sub

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (9744) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, 2021, 2024, and Word in Microsoft 365.