footnotes with multiple sections

[Guest]

I have a very long technical document (350+ pages) broken up into sections.
My footnotes are continuous by section, for example: 3-1, 3-2, 3-3.....

My problem occurs when I have footnotes on multiple pages in the same
section. At the beginning of section 3 I have footnotes 3-1, 3-2, 3-3, 3-4,
3-5, and 3-6. At the bottom of the next page of section 3 I have more
footnotes that should start with 3-7. Instead they start with 3-9 (the
numbering jumps from 3-6 to 3-9).

This is a very large, complex document with a lot of links hidden in the
text. I believe it was originally written with WordPerfect (a long time
ago). I am tasked with fixing this footnote problem and would like to know
if there is an easy way to fix the formatting problem

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

Have you been using track changes?

What version of Word?

Are your footnotes *really* numbered 3-1, 3-2, etc? Because I didn't
realize Word offered that as a number format choice, which makes me wonder
if your notes are actually custom marks. If you insert a new note, do all
the others automatically update in number?

There have been problems with footnotes in documents converting from WP...

 

[Guest]

Hi Daiya,

Yes we are using track changes.

Whoever first put in the original footnotes was pretty tricky. What I think
they did was insert them as a regular footnote 1, 2, 3, 4. Then they
manually typed the following code in front of the formatted number to get the
section number:

REF _Ref480250960 \r \t \* MERGEFORMAT

I accessed this code by highlighting the section number in the footnote,
right clicking, then selecting "Toggle Field Codes."

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

Hmm...

If you are tracking changes, the footnote numbers will not sort themselves
out until you have accepted all changes.

By the way, what you have (I think) is a cross-reference next to a footnote.
Footnotes update without the user doing anything--Cross-References you have
to manually update by Select All (cntl-A), then hitting F9 to Update Fields.
But select all only selects main text, not headers, etc, so you might have
to do that multiple places. All that's just FYI, I think Track Changes is
causing the issue you reported. I'll have to remember that trick, although
using a field to get the Section number might have worked better.

Daiya