Please Note: This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Word versions: 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003. If you are using a later version (Word 2007 or later), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for later versions of Word, click here: Converting Footnotes to Endnotes.

Converting Footnotes to Endnotes

Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated July 31, 2020)
This tip applies to Word 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003


1

Footnotes and endnotes are an important part of many documents. If you have a document that includes many footnotes, you may need to convert all those footnotes to endnotes. This is a common occurrence to meet the needs of different audiences—some prefer footnotes and some prefer endnotes.

To convert all your footnotes to endnotes, follow these steps if you are using Word 2002 or Word 2003:

  1. Choose Reference from the Insert menu, and then choose Footnote from the resulting submenu. Word displays the Footnote and Endnote dialog box. (See Figure 1.)
  2. Figure 1. The Footnote and Endnote dialog box.

  3. Click the Convert button. Word displays the Convert Notes dialog box. (See Figure 2.)
  4. Figure 2. The Convert Notes dialog box.

  5. Make sure the Convert All Footnotes to Endnotes radio button is selected.
  6. Click OK to close the Convert Notes dialog box.
  7. Click Cancel to close the Footnote and Endnote dialog box.

If you are using Word 97 or Word 2000, follow these steps instead:

  1. Position the insertion point within the section that contains your endnotes (the main body of your document).
  2. Choose Footnote from the Insert menu. Word displays the Footnote and Endnote dialog box.
  3. Click the Options button. Word displays the Note Options dialog box.
  4. Click the Convert button. (This button is only available if there are footnotes in the document.) Word displays the Convert Notes dialog box.
  5. Make sure the Convert All Footnotes to Endnotes radio button is selected.
  6. Click OK to close the Convert Notes dialog box.
  7. Click Cancel to close the Note Options dialog box.
  8. Click Cancel to close the Footnote and Endnote dialog box.

At this point all your footnotes are dutifully converted to endnotes and your entire document is repaginated to reflect the change in layout.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (8613) applies to Microsoft Word 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003. You can find a version of this tip for the ribbon interface of Word (Word 2007 and later) here: Converting Footnotes to Endnotes.

Author Bio

Allen Wyatt

With more than 50 non-fiction books and numerous magazine articles to his credit, Allen Wyatt is an internationally recognized author. He is president of Sharon Parq Associates, a computer and publishing services company. ...

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What is three less than 4?

2017-01-13 17:25:32

Jennifer Rogers

I work for an academic publisher. Often we have several files (individual chapters of a book) including text and footnotes, and I can convert the footnotes to endnotes with a problem. The difficulty is that I need to cut and paste the endnotes at the bottom of each file and create a new file for the back matter of the book, listing the notes by chapter in chronological order. When I attempt this every note is numbered "1" throughout the list. I need to find a solution to have the notes retain their original numbering, to avoid errors. It seems for years I was able to do this without any authomatic renumbering of each note to "1"; a friend in book production is having the same issue. Could this be due to opening the file in different versions of Word? It seems to be happening since Word 2013 was released. Is there any tip to overcome challenge? Thanks in advance for response.


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