Positioning the Footnote Separator

When Jim prints his document, the footnotes appear as they should at the bottom of each page. Just above the footnotes and below the page's text is the footnote separator. It lines up with the indented first line of a normal paragraph. Jim would rather have the footnote separator align to the left margin rather than being indented.

The footnote separator is inserted, automatically, by Word in its own paragraph. As a paragraph, you can easily format it just as you would any other paragraph. Follow these steps:

1. Make sure you are viewing your document in Draft view. (Click on the Draft View icon in the Views group in the View tab of the ribbon.)
2. Display the References tab of the ribbon.
3. Click Show Notes.
4. If you have both footnotes and endnotes defined in your document, Word displays the View Footnotes dialog box. (See Figure 1.) If you don't have both, the Footnotes window is displayed at the bottom of the screen, and you can skip to step 7.



Figure 1. The Show Notes dialog box.

5. Click on the View Footnote Area radio button.
6. Click on OK. Word displays the Footnotes window at the bottom of the screen.
7. Using the Footnotes drop-down list at the top of the Footnotes window, choose Footnote Separator. The current separator appears in the window, and the insertion point should be within the separator.
8. Use Word's regular formatting tools to change the paragraph indentation on the separator. (These are the tools in the Paragraph group on the Home tab of the ribbon, in the Paragraph group on the Layout tab of the ribbon, or in the Paragraph dialog box.)
9. Click on the Close button at the upper-right of the Footnotes window.

While the above works just fine, there are a couple of things you need to keep in mind. First, you can increase the paragraph indent for the separator, but it does no good to try using a negative indent. Word, for some reason, will not allow the footnote separator to extend beyond the left margin of the page. The separator is actually moved to the left, but it "cuts off" at the margin specified for the page.

Another thing to keep in mind is that, by default, the footnote separator and the other separator lines used by footnotes and endnotes all use the Normal style. If these lines start showing some strange formatting characteristics, it is more than likely because you've made some changes in how the Normal style is defined. (This is probably what happened in Jim's case—his Normal style was changed to use an indented first line, so the footnote separator was also indented.) Besides the steps already outlined, there are two other ways around this problem.

First, you can make a personal rule that you never use the Normal style for any of your regular document text. Pick another style—perhaps Body Text—or create your own custom styles to use for your text. That way the Normal style remains unchanged, and you won't have unintended consequences such as you see with the Footnote Separator line.

The second approach is to define a custom style that you intend on using for your separator lines. You can then, within the footnote area, apply the style to the separator lines. In this way you can use the Normal style for other purposes, and as you change that style it won't affect the custom style you applied to the separator lines. (Of course, if the custom style is based on the Normal style, you might get some "trickle down" formatting that affects how the custom style looks whenever you make changes to the Normal style. The solution is to make sure that your custom styles are not based on the Normal style.)

Additional information about formatting the Footnote Separator and other separators can be found at the Word MVP site:

http://wordfaqs.mvps.org/NoteSeparators.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 (12312) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, 2021, 2024, and Word in Microsoft 365. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Word here: Positioning the Footnote Separator.