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Text flow in Word 2016

Anonymous
2021-09-15T22:10:22+00:00

Here's the problem. I have a long document with many footnotes. (That's a problem in itself.) There are several places in the document where the text flow is--what's the technical term?--weird. A page will break at the end of a paragraph even though there is more room on the page for the beginning of the next paragraph and the footnotes that go with it.

I have looked at the document in draft mode; Word inserted the page break automatically, so I cannot delete it.

Here's what is not the case: None of the involved paragraphs are formatted either "keep lines together" or "keep with next." There is no special formatting at all.

If I insert a line break after the first several lines of the next paragraph, the lines preceding the inserted break do move to the preceding page with their associated footnotes, but obviously I don't want the document to have random line breaks in it.

Suggestions welcome. Suzanne, if you're reading this, I also have a Latin question for you!

Many thanks.

Microsoft 365 and Office | Word | For home | Windows

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  1. Suzanne S Barnhill 277.4K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2021-09-16T11:04:20+00:00

    I suspect Doug and Stefan have covered the likely points, but there's more discussion in http://wordfaqs.ssbarnhill.com/BottomLine.htm.

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  2. Stefan Blom 340.6K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2021-09-15T23:57:22+00:00

    In a document with footnotes, you can try setting the Line Spacing of the text in the main body to a fixed amount. This applies to all versions of Word (although it may be recommended more often for older versions). See https://wordmvp.com/FAQs/Formatting/FootnoteOnDiffPage.htm.

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  3. Anonymous
    2021-09-15T23:28:33+00:00

    Line spacing in the text is "single" throughout. Line spacing in the footnotes is 9 pt. Should I change it to single? I can try that and see whether it makes a difference.

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  4. Doug Robbins - MVP - Office Apps and Services 323K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2021-09-15T22:41:01+00:00

    Is the line spacing of the text in the body of the document set to an exact figure, rather than Single or Multiple?

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