Video: Change footnote font, size, and formatting

You have inserted footnotes, but maybe you don't like the size of the number.

So, for example, we have a little superscript three here.

Maybe, you want that footnote number to be bigger, or perhaps you don't want to use superscript, or maybe, this text down here, you want it to look a little different.

Maybe, you want to change the font or the size or the spacing.

You can do all that, and the way we do that is we use Word Styles.

Now, if you have used Word Styles before or even if you haven't, they are up here on the HOME tab, okay?

And you've got your Heading Styles up here.

But Word uses Styles to display this little footnote and to make this text look good down here in your notes pane, okay?

It uses some behind-the-scenes Styles for that.

So to get to those behind-the-scenes Styles, we're going to go to this little arrow, and we're going to go down here to this Manage Styles button.

And then we want to look for the footnote reference style, so we are going to go ahead and choose alphabetical here, and then find it in here. There it is, Footnote Reference.

Okay? We are going to modify that style, and we are going to modify the font.

Incidentally, this is where you can turn off that Superscript setting if you don't want your numbers raised, but I happen to like that, so that's fine.

I just want to make my superscript numbers bigger, so I'll choose that setting there, and click OK and then OK again.

And then with the final OK button, you'll see here that the superscript numbers are now bigger, and you might even say they are a little more readable.

Okay. Now what if you want to change this text here? How do you do that? How do you change the style of that?

Again, you go to the Manage Styles button, and then because we selected that footnote text, that particular style is now selected for you in this dialog box, so that makes it handy.

You don't have to hunt around for the right style.

And then you can click Modify, Format, Font like we did before, and then you could change the font here if you want.

I'm going to choose Courier New, and I'm going to make it Italic, and then I'll keep the size the same. That's fine.

Click OK, and then I'll change the Paragraph spacing here. I'll make it 1.5 lines, and I'll add a Hanging indent too.

What the hanging indent is going to do is - it's going to move these second lines of this note text underneath the first one, so the 'A' here is going to move under the 'F', and the 'M' is going to move under the 'E', okay?

So we'll click OK, and there we go.

We have got now our note text in that Courier format, and we have got our spacing and that hanging indent all working nicely.

So that's how to change your footnotes, both the numbers and the explanatory text.

For more information about footnotes and endnotes, see the course summary.