Autobiography of George Fox

Rosie Perera said:

Do you have a good way of converting in-text footnotes to real Word footnotes? I worked out a method, but it's not transferrable to other people. It has to be recorded as a Macro anew by each person depending on the way the footnotes appear in the document they're working on. But I could explain the method to you if you want.

I'm not Calvin (obviously [:)]), but I've started working on a PB with over 300 footnotes, so any ideas that are faster than manually inserting new footnotes and manually copying-and-pasting the old footnotes into the new would be greatly appreciated! 

OK, first you have to enable the Developer tab in Word, if you haven't already, so that you can record macros:

This macro trick works only if the footnotes are all of a unique format, e.g. the footnote reference marker found in the text looks like [1] or <1> and the matching footnote can be found at the end of the document preceded by the same marker with the same punctuation, and that punctuation is not going to be confused for anything else that appears in the text for some other purpose. In other words, if you find any number within square (or angle) brackets you can be sure it is a footnote reference marker. If your document doesn't have this characteristic, do some work on the footnotes first to make sure it does.

Then it's best to make sure that the footnotes are all at the end of the document preceded by a unique line such as "Endnotes" (presumably this word doesn't appear elsewhere in the document; make it more unique than that if it does: e.g., "Endnotes Here") rather than at the end of each chapter (cut and paste to put them at the end if necessary, in the right order, chapter-by-chapter; this macro trick won't work if they are scattered around throughout the document; though you could make it work by inserting your unique line such as "Endnotes Here" at the beginning of each grouping of footnotes at the end of each chapter).

You also need to make sure you've done any other cleanup of the text you need to do, most importantly removing all the mid-paragraph hard line-breaks and removing spaces that were used for indentation, so the paragraphs wrap properly in Word. Do this in the footnotes as well.

Here's a little note trick in Word to get rid of spaces that were used for indentation of a paragraph: use "block selection" mode (Ctrl+Shift+F8) to select that rectangular region and then press Delete.

Now comes the fun!

Do a practice run of this first with footnote #1 to be sure it will record correctly and smoothly as a macro to run for all the rest of the footnotes.

1. Start at the beginning of the document.

2. Ctrl+F (Find)  [^#      -- (make sure "Use wildcards" is off in the Search dialog); this will search for open square bracket followed by any number, which you're hoping will match only footnote reference markers; modify this as needed depending on how the footnotes are punctuated in your document)

3. Upon finding the first occurence, hit Escape to dismiss the Find dialog box.

4. Press Left arrow key enough times (probably twice, depending on how many spaces are left in your document between the text and the footnote reference mark) to get the cursor to exactly after the text, where you'll want the Word superscript footnote reference mark to go. You really are hoping the person who made this document was consistent about this throughout the document, or the macro trick won't work very well.

5. Press F8  -- this turns on "extend selection" mode

6. Ctrl+F (Find)  ]    -- or whatever is the closing punctuation mark after the footnote reference marks in your document; now you should have a selection that encloses all of the text from the space to the final bracket enclosing the footnote reference mark:

7. Press Delete.

8. Insert Bookmark, call it "fn" or whatever you like; we'll reuse this bookmark over and over to get back to our place for inserting the footnote after cutting its text from below in the document.

9. Ctrl+F (Find)  Endnotes:  -- or whatever your unique line is that sets off where the endnotes begin

10. Hit Right arrow (to remove the selection and move beyond it, so the next search will work forward from where you are rather than within the selection)

11. Ctrl+F (Find)  [^#    -- find the first footnote in this section of footnotes

12. Press F8

13. Ctrl+F (Find)  ]  - find the end of the footnote mark

14. Hit Right arrow enough times to extend the selection across any space(s) between the footnote reference mark and the footnote text itself; here again you really hope the person who created the document was consistent about it; you might want to have done a consistency check ahead of time to be sure all of this will work smoothly when you're doing the macro

Now you should have a selection that covers the footnote reference mark and its punctuation and spacing after it:

15. Press Delete.

16. Press F8.   -- turns on "extend selection" mode

17. Ctrl+F (Find)  [^#   -- extend the selection up to and including the beginning of the next footnote mark (this means the macro will not work for the very last footnote, so you'll need to do that one manually, unless you've set up a fake "next" footnote after it; also this is another reason why putting all the footnotes at the end of the document first makes this all work more smoothly, so you won't have the exceptional "last footnote" for every chapter, but only once for the whole document)

18. Press Left arrow enough times to back up your selection so it covers exactly and only the footnote text (not the final paragraph mark; if you need to visualize the paragraph marks to be able to do steps like this, you can turn them on at the beginning of the whole exercise using Ctrl+Shift+8).

Now you should have a selection like this, ready to cut and paste just the footnote text and nothing more:

19. Ctrl+X (Cut)

20. Ctrl+G (Go To), select Bookmark from the list if it's not already selected, and type (or select) "fn" (or whatever name you gave the bookmark back in step 8) -- this returns to the place we marked before where we're going to insert the footnote

21. Insert Footnote (on the References tab in Word 2007)

22. Ctrl+V (Paste)

23. Ctrl+G (Go To Bookmark) "fn" again -- so we can continue where we left off

24. Ctrl+F (Find)  [^#  -- move on to next footnote to continue the process.

Stop here.

Now you're going to record a macro that covers steps 4 through 24. This is important. You want the last step of the macro to be "find the next occurrence" you don't want that to be the beginning of the macro. That way you can visually assess whether the selection has moved forward to the next place correctly before running the macro another time. And you can determine when you're done and can stop running the macro.

Memorize the steps or print them out so you can do them flawlessly while recording the macro.

Now you're ready to start recording:  On the Developer tab, click Record Macro:

Give it a name such as "FixFoonotes" (no spaces allowed) and optionally a description so you'll remember what it's for:

Click Keyboard to assign it right away to a keyboard shortcut (you can do this later if you forget, but it's easiest to do it at this step):

Press a shortcut key for this macro. I use Ctrl+. for any temporary macros I'm recording that I want to easily execute over and over. It's not assigned to anything else in Word and it's quick and easy to type. Whatever you pick, check to be sure it's not something that's already assigned to a command in Word that you might want to use someday. Backspace over it if you accidentally chose something that's already assigned. 

Click Assign and then Close.

Whoo-ey! You're now recording, so be very careful about every keystroke.

Do the steps of the macro exactly as you've practiced them, this time on the second footnote. Be sure everything is doing what you expect it to do as you go, and try not to mess up and have to undo things, as this will all get recorded in the macro. If necessary, stop recording, undo what you've done back to the beginning of when you started recording, and start again.

When you're done with step 24, click Stop Recording.

You're ready to give it a try. Without moving the cursor from where it was left off when you recorded the macro, press your shortcut key.

Verify that everything worked right.

Go back to the beginning of the document and search again for that magic sequence [^# to get set up to run the macro again.

Now you can run the macro over and over again by pressing the shortcut key repeatedly, but slowly (visually checking as you go to make sure you've actually got a footnote reference mark selected and not some date or something:  

If you hit a place where you should not run the macro, press Ctrl+F and type your search sequence again to find the next foonote, e.g., [^#

When you get to the end of the last footnote and the macro finds no more, you're done!

Sorry, I wish I could export this into a macro for you to copy/paste into Word's Visual Basic, but it's really better if you understand how and why it works and create it yourself by recording it. It will differ enough in the details from document to document that you need the fine-tuning that you can really only do by going through the steps yourself.

Hoping someone could help.. I created the macro, it seems to be working fine, except for the past couple times I have tried it, it deleted more then just the [2] reference. It deleted part of a sentence after it. Am I doing something wrong, or is this something I have to find a work around for?