Continue footnotes from previous section rather than start of document

Question

Is there any way to restart footnotes after some section breaks so that they continue from the previous section but not from the start of the document?

I have a document that has separate chapters and I want to restart the footnotes for each chapter. However, sometimes I also need to include section breaks within chapters and I don't want to restart footnotes after these section breaks.

For example I might have 2 chapters:

In chapter 1 I have one footnote. Then I have a section break. Then I start chapter 2 which has a section break in the middle. There is one footnote before the section break in chapter 2 and one footnote after.

If i restart the footnotes after the first section break and then continue the footnotes after the second section break my footnotes are numbered like so: 1,1,3.

What I want is my footnotes to be numbered: 1,1,2.

In other words, when I continue the footnotes, I want them to continute from the previous section but not from the start of the whole document.

Is there any way to do this? I am open to using VBA.

Thanks

Josh

Answer 1

I thought that in the second and third sections of Chapter 3,  you would just need "Continuous." However, while this does work for the first Continuous section, I do find that the second continuous section unfortunately applies the number that would continue from the previous continous section (including the intervening restarted one), so I get 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; 6, 7, 8, 9, 10; 1, 2, 3, 4; 15, 16, 17, 18, 19. Darn! I was so hoping that this had been fixed and was finally working. But Stefan is right; it still just doesn't work.

Answer 2

Unfortunately, setting footnote restart options for individual sections is buggy in Word. Based on the available options, it looks as if it should work, but it doesn't.

Answer 3

Woops. I did mean to write 'continuous' for those last two sections..

I wonder if I could use a macro to fix this. Is there any way in VBA to count the number of footnotes in a section or identify the number of the last footnote in a section?

If so, I could just run a macro to set a section with continuing footnotes to restart from one number higher than the number in the previous section.

Answer 4

Thanks for your help Suzanne. I'm still having a bit of trouble with it though. Maybe I'm not following your instructions correctly.

This is what I've done:

Chapter 1, First section - Numbering: continuous, Apply changes to: Whole document

Second section - Numbering: continuous, Apply changes to: This section

Chapter 2, First section - Numbering: Restart each section, Apply changes to: This section

Chapter 3, First section - Numbering: Restart each section, Apply changes to: This section

Chapter 3, Second section and third sections - Numbering: Restart each section, Apply changes to: This section

In each case I had the 'Start at:' field blank.

With one footnote in each section I still end up with: 1,2;1;1,5,6 instead of 1,2;1;1,2,3

Am I doing something wrong?

Answer 5

I actually got it to work, the other day, much to my surprise. You actually can set "Restart each section" or "Continue from previous section" for each given section. The vital point is not to specify the starting number. For example:

1. Chapter 1: Sections 1 and 2. It won't matter what the setting is for section 1; section 2 should be set to "Continue from previous section."
2. Chapter 2: Section 3. This one will be set to "Restart each section."
3. Chapter 3: Sections 4, 5, and 6. Section 4 is set to "Restart each section" and sections 5 and 6 to "Continue from previous section."

In every case, the setting must be for "This section." If you've already typed the entire document, you can save time by setting "Restart each section" for "Whole document" and then just go in and change it for specific sections as required. I don't know whether this has been fixed or always would have worked if we'd just gone at it correctly, but it certainly seems to be working now.