Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Change or Remove the Horizontal Line Above Footnotes in MS Word 2007

This should be a simple thing, right? If you don’t want a separating line above the footnotes, just remove it. In my case, the end notes flow to several pages, and a line is still being put at the top of every page, conflicting with the page header.
I look around and tried to find how to do this, but (a) the help documentation doesn’t seem to say, at least not in a place I thought to look and (b) most of the answers on the Web refer to the same set of instructions from years ago for Word 2003, even when they claim to be for 2007. The instructions are actually almost the same, except that Word 2007 no longer has a “normal” view, which is what you are supposed to start with in the instructions.
Anyway, here is how to do it in Word 2007
  • Select Draft from the View tab on the ribbon
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  • Select “Show Notes” from the References tab. If you don't see “Show Notes,” be sure you're looking at “References” and not “Review.”
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  • Now you should see your notes in the bottom pane, below this menu:
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  • Since “All Endnotes” is the first item in the drop-down box, you would think that the other options would be “All Footnotes” or similar. However, this is where you select the separator formatting & other options. Select “Endnote Separator.” I suppose if you have footnotes, you will see “Footnote Separator.”
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  • Now you can delete the separator or define a new one. I don’t know if a graphic can be substituted; I couldn’t find a way. Be sure to re-define the “Endnote Continuation Separator” also, if you need to; it’s what appears on subsequent pages.
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Thanks to Rob van der Heijden whose post was the one that finally got me on the right track!