2 Tips to Insert Footnotes to Multi-Column Pages in Your Word Document

In this article, there will be 2 tips to help you with inserting footnotes to multi-column pages in your Word document.

To insert a single footnote is easy, but it’s a different thing when you try to insert footnotes for a multi-column page. There are 2 main problems you may run into:

1. First, if only a part of your Word document is set in columns, when you insert a footnote for the rest part, such as the document title, you will see the text in columns will jump to next page, just as below:
2. Second, if you insert a footnote to a text in multi-column, then the footnote will be in columns, too.

The fact is you may want to have the footnote shown without being affected by columns.

If you ever had the above troubles, please read on to see how you can address them.

Tip 1: Modify “Layout Options”

The following steps are dedicated to fixing problem 1:

1. Firstly, open your Word and click “File” tab and click “Options” to open the “Word Options” dialog box open.
2. Then, click “Advanced”.
3. Next, scroll down to the end of the box to the “Compatibility options for” part.
4. And click “Layout Options”.
5. Then check “Lay out footnotes the way Word 6.x/95/97 does” box.
6. Last but not the least, click “OK” to save your modification.

Now, if you have previously inserted a footnote, you will find everything is back to normal now. Next time, you won’t have the same issue.

Tip 2: Use Cross-reference

1. To begin with, repeat the steps in tip 1 to change the layout options. And make sure you don’t insert a footnote for text now.
2. Then, if you want to insert a footnote “1” for a text in columns, you should now insert it somewhere outside the column text, say, behind the title. And the footnote content you type, the multiple letter “x” here, should be the words to illustrate the column text. After this, you can see the footnote in the normal way.
3. Next, place your cursor at the correct place where footnote “1” should actually goes.
4. Now, click “References” tab first.
5. Then click “Cross-reference” in “Captions” group.
6. In “Cross-reference” dialog box, choose “Footnote” for “Reference type” and “Footnote number” for “Insert reference to”.
7. Next, click to select the footnote you just create.
8. And click “Insert”. Close the dialog box when finish this.
9. Then go to select the footnote number “1” behind the title.
10. Right click and choose “Font”.
11. In “Font” dialog box, make sure “Font” tab is on.
12. Choose a font color which is the same as the document background color. Here we should choose “White”. Or you can check “Hidden” box to hide the number. Both operations make the number invisible.
13. Lastly, click “OK”.

Quickly Restore Word Files

As you can see, we can solve various tricky issues in Word by making use of different features. Some of them may not be customized to meet the exact demand, but we still can use them to do our job. This is one of the reasons that Word is popular. Apart from this, Word is also susceptible to user errors and virus attacks. Thus, you should purchase a Word file damage recovery tool to quickly restore corrupted files.

Author Introduction:

Vera Chen is a data recovery expert in DataNumen, Inc., which is the world leader in data recovery technologies, including corrupt Excel file recovery tool and pdf repair software products. For more information visit www.datanumen.com