You can then, within the footnote area, apply the style to the separator lines. The second approach is to define a custom style that you intend on using for your separator lines. That way the Normal style remains unchanged and you won't have unintended consequences such as you see with the Footnote Separator line. Pick another style-perhaps Body Text-or create your own custom styles to use for your text. Besides the steps already outlined, there are two other ways around this problem.įirst, you can make a personal rule that you never use the Normal style for any of your regular document text.
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. By default, the Footnote Separator and the other separator lines used by footnotes and endnotes all use the Normal style. While the above works just fine, there is one other thing you might want to keep in mind. Use Word's regular formatting tools to change the paragraph indentation on the separator.The current separator appears in the window, and the insertion point should be within the separator. Using the Footnotes drop-down list at the top of the Footnotes window, choose Footnote Separator.Click on the View Footnote Area radio button.If you have both footnotes and endnotes defined in your document, Word displays the View Footnotes dialog box.Display the References tab of the ribbon.(Click on the Draft View icon on the status bar of the document.) Make sure you are viewing your document in Draft view.As a paragraph, you can easily format it just as you would any other paragraph. The footnote separator is inserted, automatically, by Word in its own paragraph. Jim would rather have the footnote separator align to the left column, rather than being indented. It lines up with the indented first line of a normal paragraph. Just above the footnotes and below the page's text is the footnote separator. Your separator line modifications should appear immediately.When Jim prints his document, the footnotes appear as they should at the bottom of each page. After modifying the separator line, select the Print Layout button at the bottom of the screen (or in the View tab) to return to the Print Layout view.The bold font option can be applied to the line.įigure 19.Highlighting can be applied to the line.Changing the font color will change the line color.Increasing the font size will increase the line thickness.(You can also use the options in the Font group in the Home tab.) Select and delete the separator line or use the options in the font Mini toolbar to modify the style.Select Footnote Separator or Endnote Separator from the menu in the Footnotes pane at the bottom of the screen.It is not possible to modify the style of the footnote separator and endnote separator at the same time. (This dialog box won’t appear if you only have footnotes or endnotes.) (Optional Step) If you have footnotes and endnotes, choose View footnote area or View endnote area followed by the OK button in the Show Notes dialog box.Select Show Notes in the Footnotes group.Select the References tab in the ribbon.(Word normally opens in the Print Layout view.) Select Draft in the Views group to switch to the draft view.
How to Delete or Modify the Footnote or Endnote Separator Line Your new footnote or endnote style should appear immediately. Select another style to change or select the OK button to close the Manage Styles dialog box.Select the OK button to close the Modify Style dialog box.Ensure that Only in this document is selected to limit your custom style to your current document.
If Automatically Update is checked, you won’t be able to manually change the style of individual footnotes or endnotes.įigure 8.