How to Add a Footnote in Word: What Earns One and What Does Not

To add a footnote in Word, click in your text where the reference mark belongs, open the References tab, and select Insert Footnote. Word puts a superscript number at the cursor, opens a note area at the bottom of that same page, and renumbers every note automatically whenever text moves. The keyboard shortcut is Ctrl+Alt+F on Windows and Cmd+Option+F on Mac, per Microsoft's keyboard shortcuts reference for Word. On iPad, iPhone, and Android the command sits on the Insert tab instead. Type the note text, then double-click the reference mark to return to where you were writing.

What actually earns a footnote

I write purchase justifications for a school district, which means I write documents that get audited. My last capital request for an esports lab ran 22 pages and carried 41 footnotes on the first draft. Twenty-six survived the second.

The fifteen I cut failed one test. A note earns its place when a reader needs it to check something I asserted, or when a true and necessary sentence would drag the paragraph off course. Every note I cut was doing something else: restating a claim already made in the body, parking a URL that belonged in the reference list, or explaining a decision to nobody in particular.

Purdue OWL's guidance for APA papers puts the same limit in stricter language. A footnote should express one idea, and if it runs longer than a few sentences, that material belongs in an appendix.

Word imposes no ceiling of its own. You can type six hundred words into a footnote and Word will spread it across three pages without complaint. The ceiling comes from your submission instructions, your publisher, or your department handbook. On my capital requests it is two sentences per note, a district purchasing rule rather than a formatting standard, which is why my note text usually reduces to a manufacturer part number and the date I pulled the spec sheet.

Why typing the superscript yourself breaks

The dominant wrong answer is to format a small raised number by hand, press Enter a few times, and type the note at the bottom of the page. It looks right. At the moment you type it, it is visually identical to a real footnote.

What you have made is two unrelated things. The raised number is a character with superscript formatting applied; the text at the bottom is an ordinary paragraph that happens to sit low on the page. A real footnote is an anchored pair, and Word keeps the mark and the note text together through every reflow.

The failure is delayed, which is why the method survives, and it shows up on the second or third edit pass. Add a paragraph mid-document and the typed note stays parked on its original page while the sentence it explains moves to the next one. Insert a new note earlier in the text and Word renumbers its own notes correctly; your handmade number keeps its original value and now sits in the wrong sequence. I saw a colleague's grant narrative where the note reading 7 sat at the bottom of page 9 and the sentence it belonged to had drifted to page 10. Nobody caught it until the reviewer did.

No version of the manual method survives editing. The fix is to delete both pieces and insert a real note.

Insert the note and let Word own the link

The procedure takes four steps on desktop Word.

1. Click in the body text at the exact point where the mark should sit. Word inserts it at the cursor, so cursor position is the whole decision.
2. On the References tab, in the Footnotes group, select Insert Footnote. The shortcut is Ctrl+Alt+F on Windows, Cmd+Option+F on Mac. Insert Endnote sits beside it, at Ctrl+Alt+D and Cmd+Option+E.
3. Type the note text in the area Word opened at the bottom of the page.
4. Double-click the reference mark at the start of the note to jump back to your place in the body.

The Footnotes group holds two more controls worth knowing. Next Footnote is a split button whose dropdown adds Previous Footnote, Next Endnote, and Previous Endnote, faster than scrolling when you are checking forty notes for consistency. Show Notes stays greyed out until the document contains a note.

Microsoft's support article "Insert footnotes and endnotes in Word" lists these steps for Word for Microsoft 365, Word 2024, Word 2021, Word 2019, and Word 2016.

Footnote, endnote, and footer: three things at the bottom of the page

Word's interface puts these near each other and all three occupy the lower part of a page. Their functions never overlap.

| | Footnote | Endnote | Footer | |---|---|---|---| | Where its text appears | Bottom of the page carrying the mark | End of the document, or end of the section | Bottom margin of every page in the section | | What it is anchored to | A reference mark in one specific sentence | A reference mark in one specific sentence | The page and the section, never a sentence | | Does it repeat? | No | No | Yes, on every page of its section | | Numbering | Automatic, renumbers on every edit | Automatic, renumbers on every edit | None of its own; can hold a page-number field | | Command that creates it | References > Insert Footnote | References > Insert Endnote | Insert > Footer, or double-click the bottom margin | | Word's default number format | 1, 2, 3 | i, ii, iii | Not applicable |

The practical test is repetition. If the content should appear on every page, it is footer material. If it explains one sentence and appears once, it is a note.

Every quote packet I send to the business office carries the purchase-order number and a revision date in the footer, because a reviewer who prints page 6 and loses the rest still needs to know which packet it came from. The citation for a motherboard's supported memory speed goes in a footnote on the page where I claim the speed, because it explains one line and would be noise on the other twenty-one pages.

Choose footnotes or endnotes before you have forty of them

Word defaults endnotes to lowercase Roman numerals and puts them at the end of the document. Both are Word's choices rather than scholarly requirements.

The Chicago Manual of Style, 18th edition, treats notes and bibliography as its primary citation system and accepts either footnotes or endnotes, with the placement decision usually made by the publisher. APA, 7th edition, permits footnotes at the bottom of the page or gathered on a separate page headed Footnotes after the reference list. Cite the edition you are working from, because these conventions have moved between editions and legal style manuals differ again.

Since both systems allow either placement, the real constraint comes from your assignment sheet, your journal, or your thesis office. Read that document before inserting the first note.

If you get it wrong, the fix is one dialog. Open Footnote and Endnote from the References tab and click Convert. Word offers three operations: convert all footnotes to endnotes, convert all endnotes to footnotes, and swap them. The numbering and note text survive the move; only the location changes. For a single note, right-click its text and choose Convert to Endnote.

Endnotes set to End of section carry one trap. If they appear at the end of the document anyway, open Layout, click the Page Setup dialog launcher, go to its Layout tab, and clear the Suppress endnotes checkbox for that section.

Change the numbering deliberately

The dialog launcher is the small arrow in the lower-right corner of the Footnotes group on the References tab. Everything governing how your notes are numbered lives behind it.

Location sets footnotes to Bottom of page or Below text, and endnotes to End of section or End of document. Number format offers six built-in sets: 1, 2, 3; a, b, c; A, B, C; i, ii, iii; I, II, III; and the symbol sequence *, †, ‡, §. Custom mark lets you type a character or pick one through the Symbol dialog. Start at sets the first number, which defaults to 1 and matters when a chapter file has to continue a count from the previous chapter. Numbering gives you Continuous, Restart each section, and Restart each page. Apply changes to sends your settings to This section or the Whole document.

The symbol sequence cycles and then doubles the marks, so it only works in documents with very few notes per page, which is the situation Chicago's allowance for asterisks and daggers assumes.

Restart each section is where documents quietly break, because the restart follows section breaks you inserted for entirely unrelated reasons. My capital request has three section breaks: one after the title page, one before the body, and one before the parts appendix that runs landscape to fit the price columns. I counted them again this morning, with the first snow of the year coming down and none of it sticking, and the number was three rather than the two I had in my head. With Restart each section selected, that document would have produced three separate notes numbered 1, and the audit trail would have been unusable.

Where the mark goes is a style question rather than a Word question. Chicago, 18th edition, paragraph 14.26, places the note number at the end of a sentence or clause, following any punctuation mark except the dash, which it precedes. APA gives the same placement and adds that a callout referring to material inside parentheses goes inside the closing parenthesis. Word will put the mark wherever your cursor is, including in the middle of a word, so the cursor position carries the whole rule.

Edit without breaking the link

Delete the reference mark in the body, never the note text. Removing the mark deletes the note and renumbers the rest. Removing the note text leaves the superscript stranded in your sentence pointing at nothing, which is the most common damage I see in documents that come back for revision.

Moving text carries its notes. Cut a paragraph with three marks in it, paste it four pages later, and Word renumbers both sides of the move.

When a note is too long for the space at the bottom of its page, Word splits it and continues it on the next page with a continuation separator. To change what appears there, switch to Draft view under the View tab, click Show Notes on the References tab, and pick Footnote Continuation Separator or Footnote Continuation Notice from the dropdown in the notes pane. The continuation notice is empty by default, which is why most people never learn it exists until a style guide demands a "continued on next page" line.

For appearance, edit the Footnote Text style rather than individual notes. The same instinct that makes me buy identical power supplies for every station in the lab applies here: one change to the style updates every note in the file, and forty notes formatted individually will drift.

If you use Zotero, EndNote, Mendeley, or Word's own Citations & Bibliography tools, your notes are fields rather than plain text. Editing the note text by hand works until the manager refreshes the document and your edits disappear. Change the record in the manager instead.

What changes by platform

Windows and Mac desktop versions both give you the full Footnote and Endnote dialog. Microsoft's Mac article lists Word for Microsoft 365 for Mac, Word 2024, Word 2024 for Mac, and Word 2021 for Mac, with the same References tab route and the Cmd+Option shortcuts.

Mobile apps are different in a way that catches people. Microsoft's mobile support page puts Footnote and Endnote on the Insert tab rather than References, and covers Word for iPad, iPhone, Android tablets, and Android phones. For anything beyond inserting and typing, the page tells you to open the document on a Mac or Windows computer.

Word for the web will insert footnotes and endnotes, and that is close to the whole of it. The Footnote and Endnote dialog is not exposed in the browser, so you cannot change the number format or convert footnotes to endnotes. My daughter drafts her essays on a school Chromebook, which is exactly this situation: her endnotes arrive as i, ii, iii and stay that way until the file is opened in desktop Word.

Check which build the person actually has before promising a shortcut. It is the same habit that keeps my parts cabinet honest, where the difference between two board revisions with the same product name is the difference between a machine that posts and one that does not.

Questions people keep asking

How do I add a footnote in Word on my Mac?

Click where the mark belongs, open the References tab, and select Insert Footnote. The shortcut is Cmd+Option+F, and Cmd+Option+E inserts an endnote. Microsoft lists this for Word for Microsoft 365 for Mac, Word 2024 for Mac, and Word 2021 for Mac. Formatting options sit behind the dialog launcher in the Footnotes group.

How do I do a footnote?

Put the cursor at the end of the sentence the note explains, go to the References tab, and click Insert Footnote. Word adds a superscript mark and opens a note area at the bottom of that page. Type your note there. Word renumbers everything automatically when you add or delete notes later.

How can I make footnotes appear at the bottom of the page in Word?

Open the Footnote and Endnote dialog using the small arrow in the lower-right corner of the Footnotes group on the References tab. Under Location, select Footnotes and set it to Bottom of page rather than Below text, then apply the change to the whole document and click Insert or Apply.

How do I insert a footer in Word?

Go to Insert > Footer and choose a layout, or double-click inside the bottom margin to open the footer area directly. A footer repeats on every page of its section and holds things like page numbers, document titles, or revision dates. It has no link to any individual sentence in your text.

What is the Word footnote keyboard shortcut?

Ctrl+Alt+F inserts a footnote on Windows and Ctrl+Alt+D inserts an endnote. On Mac the equivalents are Cmd+Option+F and Cmd+Option+E, per Microsoft's keyboard shortcuts page for Word. Mobile apps and Word for the web publish no shortcut for this, so use the ribbon command on those platforms.

How can I edit a footnote in Word?

Double-click the reference mark in your text to jump to the note, or scroll down and click into the note area directly. Edit the text there. To remove a note completely, delete the superscript mark in the body; deleting only the note text leaves an orphaned mark sitting in your sentence.

When should I choose an endnote instead?

Choose endnotes when your style guide requires them, when your notes run long enough to crowd the bottom of every page, or when a publisher wants clean page bottoms. Chicago and APA both permit either placement, so the actual requirement comes from your assignment or publisher. Word's Convert button switches all notes at once.