Comments are preceded by a single quotation mark, which tells the macro to ignore the rest of the text on that line. In the macro, you’ll see a couple of “comments,” which are explanations or instructions intended for the person reading the code. So let’s use that error!īefore running the macro, you must be in Draft view, with your cursor at the top of the Notes pane. And trying to delete extra returns results in an error. As we’ve seen, you can’t just find double returns and replace them with a single return (even in a macro). Some of the returns are “special” note returns, and the only way to delete them is to delete the note itself back in the text. What’s going on there is that not all carriage returns are created equal. “This is not a valid action for footnotes.” And if you try to delete some of the remaining returns, you’ll get an error message: Word will replace some of the double returns, but not all of them. In the “Replace With” box, enter one paragraph code: In the “Find What” box, enter two paragraph codes:ĥ. Your cursor should now be in the Notes pane.Ĥ. You can try to remove the extraneous returns like this: Why? Because they don’t like the positioning of the note on the page, which they’re trying to make “pretty,” not understanding the problems that will cause in editing and typesetting. One mistake authors make is to insert extraneous carriage returns before or after a note. In fact, they’ve made it easy to mess notes up beyond repair. Many authors have no clue about how notes are meant to work, and Microsoft certainly hasn’t made it obvious.

During my editing career, I’ve often run into problems with footnotes and endnotes in Microsoft Word.

Removing an endnote in word