Tricks to formatting Word's Footnotes and Endnotes

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Change the look of Microsoft Word footnotes and endnotes.

You can change the look of footnotes and endnotes using their linked styles:

  • Footnote Reference
  • Footnote Text
  • Endnote Reference
  • Endnote Text
Footnote Styles image from Formatting Footnotes and Endnotes at Office-Watch.com

The two ‘… Reference’ styles create the look of the numbers, usually just superscript positioning of the default paragraph font. Changing the style could radically change the look throughout the document.

Footnote Styles example image from Formatting Footnotes and Endnotes at Office-Watch.com

The two ‘… Text’ styles change the look of the text, usually a smaller version of the Normal style text. Again, you can change that quite a lot if you wish, but probably not as much as this.

Footnote Style example image from Formatting Footnotes and Endnotes at Office-Watch.com

Note: if you import a document, say from a PDF file, you might get the footnotes and endnotes in the Word converted document. However these converted notes probably won’t use the standard styles mentioned above. Instead they’ll use hidden custom styles that act the same but don’t appear even in the ‘all style’ lists. To fix that, select all the text with a custom style and reformat the selections to the matching in-built Word style.