Inserting a footnote adds half a blank page to document

[bandstra]

Hi,

I'm trying to insert a footnote into my MS Word 2003 document, but
whenever I do the formatting gets very weird. I've put a screenshot of
my file here: http://img209.imageshack.us/img209/7205/footnotepo4.jpg

What is happening is that it is taking my document and putting a lot of
blank lines into it, and is only allowing me to write on about half the
page. This doesn't look very good, and I'd really like for the
footnotes to behave nicely at the bottom of the page.

Can anyone help me?

Thanks,
Bryan

 

[macropod]

Hi Bryan,

This could be a problem with the footnote separator, or with the footnote
itself.

For example, if your footnote has an excessive leading/trailing space (eg
via the insertion of superfluous para marks/multiple line spacing or via
footnote paragraph/style formatting), that will increase the space required
for the footnote. You should be able to see at a glance if there's any
superfluous para marks attached to the footnote or if it uses multiple line
spacing. For the footnote paragraph leading/trailing formatting, select the
footnote text and use Format|Paragraph to check the dimensions.

Similarly, if the footnote separator (i.e. the horizontal line above the
footnote) is formatted with too much leading/trailing space, that too can
use up the lower part of the page. To check/correct that, you have to use
'Normal' view, then double-click the footnote, select the 'footnote
separator' from the drop-down. You can then reformat it if need be.

Cheers

 

[bandstra]

Thanks for the quick reply.

I have fixed my problem thanks to you
For others, what I had to do was turn on the "Show/Hide" button (lets
you see formatting such as spaces and returns) and go to 'Normal' view,
then double-click the footnote, and select the 'footnote separator'
from the drop-down. There I saw that I had a whole bunch of useless
returns in there. Once I deleted that all was well within my soul!

Once again, thanks