Here, you can change the font, font size, and other format settings.

To edit either of these elements, click on the arrow next to it on the Styles list and select Modify. The footnote reference is the number or symbol appearing in your main text, whereas the footnote text is the content usually placed at the bottom of the page. Footnote Reference and Footnote Text should now be visible in the Styles list. Under Select how list is sorted, choose Alphabetical. Under Select styles to show, choose All styles. If you don’t see Footnotes listed, click the Options button at the bottom.

Click the Home tab, then click the downward arrow in the Styles section to open a list of style elements. To format all footnotes in a document, you need to use Styles. A format ribbon will appear with options to change the font, text colour, paragraph spacing, and more. To format one or more footnotes on a page, select the footnote text. You can format all footnotes in a Word document by using Styles (Image credit: Microsoft)

Once you’ve written your footnote, you can edit it at any time by clicking on it. This is a great advantage of the footnotes tool versus manually creating references in the footer. Word also takes care of the footnotes’ numerical progression as you add more to your document. By default, it matches the superscript number or symbol in the text with the one next to the footnote. When you insert a footnote, Word automatically takes you to the bottom of the page to write it. Repeat Step 1 before clicking Insert Footnote. However, if it’s been lost, simply undo the insertion of the footnote by clicking Undo in the Home tab or by pressing Ctrl+Z on a Windows PC. The placement of the footnote should be retained from Step 1. In the Footnotes section, click the Insert Footnote button. Your References ribbon is divided into sections including Table of Contents, Footnotes, and others.

If you choose to do this, skip ahead to step 4. On a Windows PC, you can also press Ctrl+Alt+F, which directly inserts a footnote on the selected text. Depending on which version of Word you’re using, you can click on the downward arrow at the far-right end of the ribbon and select Always show Ribbon or click the thumbtack icon to have the commands always be visible. Click the References tab again, and the commands should now be visible. If the commands suddenly disappear, you may not have your ribbon set to always display.

How to add a footnote in microsoft word