Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated June 8, 2021)
This tip applies to Word 2007, 2010, 2013, and 2016
Nancy notes that for years she has used Word's footnotes with no problem. When she inserts a footnote, the footnote reference (in the footnote area) shows as a superscripted number. Some of the style guides that Nancy follows now specify that footnote references actually be regular (not superscripted) digits followed by a period. She wonders how she can get Word to handle this formatting automatically.
This is a bit more complex of a topic than it may appear at first. There are actually two footnote references—one in the main body of the document and the other at the beginning of the actual footnote. The appearance of both of these references is controlled by the Footnote Reference character style. If you change the formatting of this style, you change how the actual footnote reference appears.
The problem, of course, is two-fold. First, the Footnote Reference style is a character style, which means that it defines the appearance of the text itself, not the appearance of any special characters after the text, such as a period and a space or tab. Thus, you can change the Footnote Reference style so that the references appear as, say, unsuperscripted, but you cannot specify that the reference be followed by a period through the style.
The second problem is that even if you could define such special characters in the Footnote Reference style, it wouldn't help in this case. Because the style is used for the footnote reference in the main body of the document as well as at the beginning of the footnote itself, a change to the style affects both instances. So if you change the Footnote Reference style to display regular (unsuperscripted) text, then the references in both places—the document body and the footnote area—are affected.
There is a workaround you can use; one that involves doing some searching and replacing. Go ahead and insert your footnotes as you normally would. When you are all done (when you have no more footnotes to add to the document), follow these general steps:
Figure 1. The Replace tab of the Find and Replace dialog box.
That's it. Word does the Find and Replace operation only within the footnotes area of the document. It replaces any footnote references with an unsuperscripted reference followed by a period. This find-and-replace process is described more fully at this archived Web page:
http://lists.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1703696660
If you find in your version of Word that the steps don't work for some reason, you could try to replace what you search for. Instead of searching for "02" (step 4), leave the Find What box empty and instead indicate you want to search for any text that has the Footnote Reference style applied to it. Since you are searching only within the footnote area of the document, this would only be the references that begin each of the footnotes.
Understand that if you later add any new footnotes to your document, you will need to go through the find-and-replace operation again. If you are looking for a more automatic way to handle the footnotes, then you will need to develop a macro that will handle the formatting for you. A great article on this can be found at the following page on the Word MVP site:
http://wordmvp.com/FAQs/MacrosVBA/UnSuperscptFnotes.htm
WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (11259) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, and 2016. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Word here: Changing How Footnote References Appear.
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2022-11-07 10:26:16
Thank you very much for this instruction. It has saved me a great deal of time and effort. Other times I have consulted your website but the relief you have given me this time has motivated me to write this thank you note.
What you do is worth its weight in gold.
2020-04-30 01:57:30
Freys
Not sure how to submit a novel question so will post here in hopes of getting help. It relates to the current topic.
I'm formatting a large document with a lot of main document reference marker numbers that are not superscripted. I see that they have not been inserted originally in Footnote reference style (but are just in the same style as the content they follow, which is Normal body text), so I'd like to Ctrl H to find and replace all instances of Main Document Footnote reference markers, changing the style to the one needed, 'Footnote Reference'.
The problem is that I can't find a way to search for these. Searching for 'any digit' doesn't reveal them at all. They are not in the Footnote Reference style, so they can't be found that way. There isn't a formatting option I can see that would bring them up, and they are not listed in the special characters.
How do I seek out and highlight in an isolated way these slippery little entities?
2017-03-22 19:29:52
Word update KB3178674 cosed that superscripted footnote references on screen and print look lake subsripted (in text and in the references). Haw this bug can be reported to Microsoft?
2016-11-26 13:21:36
Rick
When I follow these directions in Word 2016, all the options in the Format button's drop-down menu are grayed out.
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