Restarting Footnote Numbering after Page Breaks

Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated November 27, 2023)
This tip applies to Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and 2021

Elsen is working on his dissertation, and the style he must follow requires that footnote numbers restart at 1 after each page break. Elsen wonders how he can make sure that Word restarts the footnote numbering as he needs.

This is relatively easy to do in Word. Here's how:

Display the References tab of the ribbon.
Click the small icon at the lower-right corner of the Footnotes group. Word displays the Footnote and Endnote dialog box. (See Figure 1.)

Figure 1. The Footnote and Endnote dialog box.

Change the Start At value to 1.
Change the Numbering drop-down list to Restart Each Page.
If your document has multiple sections in it (as implemented by adding section breaks), use the Apply Changes To drop-down list to specify whether you want this numbering scheme to apply to the entire document or just the current section.
Click Apply.
Click Cancel to close the Footnote and Endnote dialog box.

The result is that your footnotes should start over, at 1, for each page 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 (13682) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and 2021.

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 nine more than 8?

2023-11-27 04:40:57

Kiwerry

@Ler: Strange. Your comment piqued my curiosity, so I created a document two pages long in Word (365) with a footnoted word on each page. When I switched from "Continuous" to "Restart Each Page" and clicked "Apply", the numbering changed as expected. I suspected it might depend on whether the footnotes were placed below the text or at the foot of the page, but that made no difference; the numbering still changed as expected.

2021-06-18 10:13:20

Ler

This did not work for me. The footnotes' numbering remains continuous throughout the whole document, even though "Restart Each Page" and "Whole Document" are selected.

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