
Please Note: This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Word versions: 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003. If you are using a later version (Word 2007 or later), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for later versions of Word, click here: Heavy-Duty Footnotes.

Heavy-Duty Footnotes

by Allen Wyatt
(last updated May 3, 2014)

2

Carlisle ran into a problem with a professor that was using Word to write a "parallel book." The book would feature Latin text on one page with the parallel English translation on the adjacent page. Each page could contain footnotes, and the footnotes must be counted independently of each other. Carlisle wondered if there was a way to accomplish such a task in Word.

The short answer is no, there is no way. Word was never designed to do such a task. There are, however, workarounds. The first work-around is to simply rely on the book's publisher to handle the footnote issue. This answer is not as flippant as it may at first seem. Many professors are published by academic presses, and those companies wouldn't do their final typesetting in Word. Instead, they use Word as a source of the text that they import into their composition software. A quick check with the publisher may save hours of footnote frustration, because they may want the footnotes done in an altogether different manner that doesn't even involve Word's automatic footnoting.

Assuming that the professor is going to self-publish, then another simple workaround is to just store each of the parallel translations in different document files. Put the English translation in one document and the Latin in another. Then each can have its own footnotes. When it comes time to create the final document, just print one translation on each side of the paper. On the first printing pass, for instance, you could print the Latin document. Then turn the paper over and print the English document. This may take some trial-and-error, but it is ultimately quite flexible.

The downside to this, of course, is that the page numbering will also be independent in each file. That means that each file will have a page 1, etc. What you probably want is to have one document represent the even page numbers and the other represent the odd page numbers. This is handled easily enough by using a field to calculate the page numbers that are printed in the header or footer:

{ = 2 * { PAGE } }
{ = 2 * { PAGE } -1 }

The first field is used to calculate and display the even page numbers and the second one does the odd page numbers.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (1470) applies to Microsoft Word 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003. You can find a version of this tip for the ribbon interface of Word (Word 2007 and later) here: Heavy-Duty Footnotes.

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. ...

MORE FROM ALLEN

Creating a Simple TOC

Sometimes a table of contents created by Word can have a few too many bells and whistles. Here's how to get rid of the ...

Discover More

Inserting the User's Initials

One of the pieces of information tracked by Word are your name and initials. You can insert your initials by using the ...

Discover More

Finding Fields

Fields allow you to add simple dynamic content to your document. Here's how you can find the fields when you need to know ...

Discover More

Create Custom Apps with VBA! Discover how to extend the capabilities of Office 2013 (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Access) with VBA programming, using it for writing macros, automating Office applications, and creating custom applications. Check out Mastering VBA for Office 2013 today!

More WordTips (menu)

IEEE Citation Format

Different style guides describe different ways of formatting information that appears in a document. One such style guide ...

Discover More

Endnotes by Chapter

Word allows you to easily add endnotes to your document. It even allows you to specify where those endnotes should appear ...

Discover More

Sequentially Numbering Footnotes

If you have a document with lots of footnotes, you might notice that some of those footnotes are not in numerical order, ...

Discover More
Subscribe

FREE SERVICE: Get tips like this every week in WordTips, a free productivity newsletter. Enter your address and click "Subscribe."

View most recent newsletter.

Comments

If you would like to add an image to your comment (not an avatar, but an image to help in making the point of your comment), include the characters [{fig}] in your comment text. You’ll be prompted to upload your image when you submit the comment. Maximum image size is 6Mpixels. Images larger than 600px wide or 1000px tall will be reduced. Up to three images may be included in a comment. All images are subject to review. Commenting privileges may be curtailed if inappropriate images are posted.

What is eight minus 6?

2017-01-28 10:55:20

Jonathan Handel

PS: When using endnotes and footnotes as described in my othercomment, he could even make the English-language notes use Arabic numerals and the Latin ones use Roman numerals. However, those might get ridiculously long if numbered continuously throughout the book.


2017-01-28 10:52:17

Jonathan Handel

He can set the footnotes to restart each page, and then they will be numbered independently.

But perhaps he wants the notes to run in two sequences that are numbered continuously throughout the respective languages. The above answer seems to assume that this is what was desired, but the question doesn't actually say so.

There is a solution even here, I think: Use footnotes on the left-hand pages and endnotes on the right-hand pages (or vice versa). They will be numbered independently of each other. Set the endnotes to display at the end of each section. Put a hard page break after each left-hand page and a section break (new page) after each right-hand page.

Caveats:

The endnotes will appear right after the text on the right-hand page, rather than at the bottom of the page. So, he will need to follow the text with blank lines to force the endnotes down. If the text or endnotes on the right-hand page change, the number of blank lines will have to be adjusted. Also, the spacing or font size of the blank lines may have to be changed, in order to get exactly the right amount of space the force the endnotes all the way to the bottom of the page.

Using blank lines like this is appropriate for self-publishing, but will probably not be what a commercial publishing house will want to see.

Also, this solution assumes that there are not multiple sections within each right-hand page-- or at least, that the endnotes are all in last section on each page.

Why would there be multiple sections on a single page?

The most common reason sections change within a page if is you switch between one column layout to two (or more) columns. So, if each page has an un-annotated heading in one column layout (across the width of the page), then a body in two columns that will have notes, that's ok.

But if the heading will also have notes, or if he switches from one column to two and then back again, this approach won't work.

In fact, both endnotes and footnotes are fouled by such switching: the endnotes will appear after each section, so some will idiotically appear in mid-page. And the footnotes (on left-hand pages) will convert some of the section break (continuous) occurrences to section break (new page) occurrences instead.


This Site

Got a version of Word that uses the menu interface (Word 97, Word 2000, Word 2002, or Word 2003)? This site is for you! If you use a later version of Word, visit our WordTips site focusing on the ribbon interface.

Newest Tips
Subscribe

FREE SERVICE: Get tips like this every week in WordTips, a free productivity newsletter. Enter your address and click "Subscribe."

(Your e-mail address is not shared with anyone, ever.)

View the most recent newsletter.
https://word.tips.net/T001470_Heavy-Duty_Footnotes.html
word.tips.net
crawl=CC-MAIN-2021-39
48961
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:26SVRS3CAN5BKQ2R2SGUAYAVIH2XMKRE
<urn:uuid:a7c27bc2-3fca-48d3-b484-03247ae2849b>
2021-09-28T13:57:41Z
50.28.58.201
text/html
sha1:4MSW5XJYG4R2P4VDIGHLBXBPP7E2L67K
<urn:uuid:4414242b-4d61-488e-9870-c3d2cbc9cb18>
https://word.tips.net/T001470_Heavy-Duty_Footnotes.html
response
<urn:uuid:9f3073b6-fa4c-4378-8d8d-172e3b400244>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2021-39
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for September 2021
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-232
software: Apache Nutch 1.18 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.2-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/