converting footnotes to endnotes

[schmargle]

I have a medium-sized document (about 40 pages) that has a fair number of
footnotes. I'd like to convert all those footnotes to endnotes. I've tried
using the "insert" menu option and selecting "convert all footnotes to
endnotes." I've also tried going to the footnotes and right-clicking to
convert.

The problem is that when I do either of these things, the document tries to
repaginate itself, and it winds up creating thousands and thousands of pages.
Really. I've had this happen using Word OS X on a Mac and Word 2003 on Win
XP. The same thing happens in both cases. ...And it happens with multiple
documents. On Win XP, the document gets up to about 7,000 pages long before
it says that it can't go any further. If I try to hit "escape" during the
pagination, it changes to "Normal" view and, of course, the end notes are not
there. When I then change back to the "Print" layout, repagination starts
again.

Any suggestions?

Thanks.

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

Infinite repagination is a sign of corruption. Uncorrupt the doc, then
change the footnotes over (which works fine, it doesn't do this on
everyone's computer).

The first way to check for a corrupt document is to
copy the entire thing, *excluding* the last paragraph mark, into a new
document. That last paragraph mark holds a lot of information which can get
corrupted, and copying the text into a document with a fresh one keeps your
formatting, but can fix some glitches.

A paragraph mark is a ¶. Click on ¶ on the standard toolbar to show
nonprinting characters, including paragraph marks.

I think Word 2003 is a little bit better at repair than MacWord is, but
here's the links for both, if the above doesn't work.
http://www.mvps.org/word/FAQs/AppErrors/CorruptDoc.htm

Mac instructions:
http://word.mvps.org/MacWordNew/DocumentCorruption.htm
(hit reload a few times in Safari, if that doesn't work, try Explorer)

 

[schmargle]

Thanks for the note. No luck, though. On the Mac, I paste the text from the
original doc to another one (without that last paragraph mark), then try to
convert footnotes to endnotes, and Word just hangs forever, with the little
beach ball spinning. I have to force quit.

Any other suggestions? It seems to work okay if I convert one footnote at a
time, but this manuscript of mine has about 10 chapters, and each has about
60 footnotes.

Thanks.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Did you read the rest of Daiya's post? She did offer other suggestions.

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

See the suggested links for other ways of fixing a corrupted document, if
that first one doesn't work--I did neglect to explicitly say that, I guess.
Sometimes I need to be less elliptical.

By the way, a compilation of links re Word for thesis/manuscript writers,
might be useful someday, though not in this case:
http://daiya.mvps.org/bookword.htm

 

[schmargle]

Yes, I did try converting it to a web page and back. Still the same. When I
convert the document back to Word, and try to convert footnotes to endnotes,
it repaginates forever.

Bringing it into another text editor is not really an option, since I'd lose
all the formatting and notes. I'm not really sure what a "binary search" is,
but it seems like the idea is just to find the corruption....which is
tantamount to converting each footnote at a time--the thing I'm hoping to
avoid.

I can't exactly recall, but I think that I brought these documents into Word
originally from AppleWorks years ago. I think it was by some long conversion
process, saving it as an earlier version of Word, then saving it up to the
most recent version. So I wouldn't be surprised if there is something wacky
about the formatting of one or more footnotes. Having said that, though, I
was also pretty careful to make sure to apply the correct style attributes to
every single note, so I would think that doing so would have helped, if there
had been a problem in the way Word reads some small bit of formatting info
following the conversion.

In any case, I appreciate the suggestions. If you have any other
suggestions, I'd appreciate them too. More importantly, if anyone is aware of
this just being a bug in Word, I'd be happy to know that I'm simply wasting
my time trying to fix it.