Editing Footnotes and Endnotes in Microsoft Word

I used Microsoft Word daily for much of my career as a technical writer. Fortunately, most of the documents I had to work with in Word were fairly straightforward, but occasionally I'd run into one where the author had used footnotes. Sometimes things went well, but just as often they didn't. 

Here's a good article from the Editing in Word website that offers some good tips on using footnotes and endnotes in Word. It's worth reading if you use them, especially if you are using a more recent version of Word than the now ancient Word 2013 that I still use at home. 

The footnote function is one of the great features of Word: it will automatically change numbering, place them in order at the bottom of the page, shift them as pages grow and shrink, and renumber when they are moved around. The endnote function is similarly great. And even better, you can use both in one document!

However, editing footnotes and endnotes poses some challenges. Sure, Word will track changes you make to the words in the note, but it doesn’t handle other edits quite so smoothly, as shown in the demo video below.