Line numbers have automatically appeared, but the formatting of the text, its justification etc., remain as they were. It will automatically be set to None – choose Continuous and see what happens to your paragraphs … There you will find Line Numbers:Ĭlick on the arrow next to Line Numbers to bring up its Options menu: Line numbering and its options can be found in Word 2007 and Word 2010 in the Page Layout tab, in the Page Setup area. How to add line numbers to a Word document – the correct way (Word 2007, Word 2010 and Word 2013) The numbers push the lines across and they run over onto the next line all possibility of right justification is lost and heaven help you if you want to insert or delete any text once you’ve done it! Then you would highlight the whole text and add numbered bullets. Well, to do this you would have to put a return at the end of each line to make it into a new line. If you find the need to add line numbers, it’s kind of natural that you might think – oh, I’ll just make the whole document into a numbered list. How NOT to add line numbers to a Word document So these are all reasons for adding line numbers to a Word document. Transcriptions will sometimes have line numbers, if they’re going to be discussed in detail, and we can probably all recall from our dim and distant pasts working on critiques of poems and plays which had 5, 10, 15 etc. Presumably they wanted to be able to refer to particular line numbers in their criticism of the piece. I was inspired to write this post after my colleague Katharine O’Moore Klopf mentioned that she’d been asked to do this by the editors of a journal for which she was editing an article. Why do I need to add line numbers to a Word document? Why would you want to do that? Read on and find out! This works for Word 2007, Word 2010 and Word 2013. You’ve now got rid of that empty paragraph for ALL footnotes in your document.This article explains the correct – and incorrect – way to add line numbers to a Word document. Change the view back Print Layout ( View tab > Print Layout).Click the X at the far right of the Footnotes mini window to close it.Place your cursor at the end of separator line, then press Delete to remove the empty paragraph below.Now you can see the separator and the empty paragraph:.Change the Footnotes setting from All Footnotes to Footnote Separator.A mini Footnotes window opens at the bottom of the page:.Once you’re in Draft view, go to the References tab then click Show Notes.You must be in Draft view to do this ( View tab > Draft).You must have at least one footnote in your document before you can do the steps below.You can’t get rid of the the empty paragraph using normal deletion methods either. It’s that empty paragraph that annoys a lot of people - it just adds unwanted space in front of the page’s footnotes, when there’s already a visual separator in the partial line. The footnote separator line and the empty paragraph are styled as ‘Normal’, so if you’ve adjusted the paragraph spacing (leading) above and/or below in the style, you may get way more space than you need, as shown in the screenshot below. When you insert a footnote in Word ( References tab > Insert Footnote), by default it gets added to the bottom of the page along with a short line and an empty paragraph to separate it from the body of the text.