Please Note: This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Word versions: 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and 2021. If you are using an earlier version (Word 2003 or earlier), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for earlier versions of Word, click here: Searching for Footnote and Endnote Marks.

Searching for Footnote and Endnote Marks

Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated June 7, 2022)
This tip applies to Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and 2021

If you don't know where a footnote or endnote reference is located in your document, you can use Word's powerful searching capabilities to find automatic footnote references. To search for a footnote or endnote, follow these steps if you are using Word 2007:

Press Ctrl+F to display the Find tab of the Find and Replace dialog box. (See Figure 1.)

Figure 1. The Find tab of the Find and Replace dialog box.

In the Find What box, enter the text for which you want to search. To search for a footnote mark, enter ^f. To search for an endnote mark, instead enter ^e.
Set other searching parameters, as desired.
Click on Find Next.

If you are using Word 2010 or a later version of Word, then the Find and Replace dialog box is not displayed when you press Ctrl+F. Instead, Word displays the Navigation pane to the left of your document when you press Ctrl+F. You can still use ^f or ^e in the box at the top of the pane, and Word displays all instances of the footnote and endnote marks in your document.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (11162) 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: Searching for Footnote and Endnote Marks.

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 5 - 3?

2024-10-28 16:41:21

Gary Scarano

OK, this used to worked on my old mac, buy I just purchased a new mac book pro. Now it will not allow me to search for a footnote number. I have a book with about 600 footnotes and I would like to serch for specific ones, like #557, but my new mac won’t do it. Version 16.90 (24101387) Please help

2022-02-10 13:53:29

Dr Caroline Kaye

Just tried the ^f tip, but Word says ^ is not recognised for the "find" facility.

2020-10-05 15:10:20

Dan Appel

A follow up to my last note. I have a very frustrating dilemma. I produced a document in Indesign which I am in the process of formatting for Kindle. Unfortunately, Adobe has never made it possible to export a document to Microsoft Word which is what Kindle wants for Kindle Create. The work around, according to Adobe and Amazon is to export the document as a PDF and then import the document into Word. It worked fairly well, except, that now Word does not recognize any of the endnote numbers which I want to turn into hyperlinks connected to the Endnote for Kindle and eventually Epub. This is a very long document - almost 600 pages with almost 1000 endnotes. I cannot go back and recreate every Endnote. Any ideas what I can do?

Thanks in advance for your help

2019-05-12 13:41:36

Neil Macowan

I need to find the footnote numbers that appear in the text, not the footnotes per se. How can I do this?

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