Jackie is having a problem with the footnotes in a document. It seems that some of the footnotes in the first chapter of her Ph.D. thesis have disappeared. She can view them in Normal view, but she needs to also view them in Page Layout view so she can ultimately print them out. Jackie wonders what is causing the problem.

There are a number of things to check. First, you should check the obvious formatting-related issues. Are some of your footnotes formatted as Hidden text? If they are and you have Word configured to not print Hidden text, the footnotes will not be visible in Print Preview.

You'll also want to check to make sure that Track Changes isn't turned on. It is possible, if it is turned on, that you've actually deleted some of your footnotes. They may still be visible in some views of your document, but wouldn't be visible in Print Preview if you are looking at the "final" document with markup taken into account.

You should also not assume that what you see in Print Layout view is equivalent to what you will see when you actually print your document. Take a look at your thesis in Print Preview and see if your footnotes all show up there. Some users have reported large discrepancies between what is displayed in Print Layout view and what shows up in Print Preview.

You could also have problems if the text of your document is within a large table in which a single table row extends for several pages. Word defers any footnotes in the row to the page where the row ends. If the row ends so close to the bottom of the page that there is not room for all the footnotes, instead of being carried to the next page, the footnotes are just ignored. This problem can be solved by breaking the row up into several rows; any row that long is bound to contain more than one paragraph, and it can be split so that there is one row for each paragraph.

It's also possible, given that this is a thesis, that the length of the footnotes is such that they are overpowering the page. I would think that Word would just take as much room as needed for footnotes, even if that left only a few lines of text on each page, but there may be some limitation. If the footnotes are that long, it might be more satisfactory to convert them to endnotes. At the very least you could try converting the footnotes to endnotes and seeing if they all show up in the endnotes. This may at least give you a starting point for figuring out what is going on.