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Get text in multi-line footnotes to align

Hi 

I work on big reports with lots of footnotes. 

According to our organisation's style manual the text in footnotes is supposed to stay aligned like this:

1 Smith (2012) said blah blah and John (2010)
   said blah blah blah.

That is, the text in the second line should be directly beneath the text in the first line. In the example, the first 's' in said is supposed to be directly beneath the 'S' in Smith.

I've tried using hanging indents but they have to be different for each footnote and have to get updated if the number of footnotes changes (i.e. when the above footnote becomes footnote 11 rather than 1 the text would get pushed across and throw out the indent.

Is there any simple way to get consistent indents either with or without the use of a macro?

Josh
Answer
Answer

Insert a tab between the footnote # and text, together with a hanging indent and a tab-stop at the desired position for the first line's text. Update your footnotes Style with that format. You'll still need to insert the tab characters manually (or use Find/Replace to do it for existing footnotes), but that should give you the consistent layout you need.

 

FWIW, you shouldn't need different indents for footnotes 1-9, compared to 10-99 or 101+ - they should all be the same as for the largest number you'll require.

Cheers
Paul Edstein
(Fmr MS MVP - Word)

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Last updated January 31, 2024 Views 2,537 Applies to: