EMERGENCY: Footnotes are not following text that is cut/paste.

Question

I've been using Word for my entire career, and I've never seen this behavior before:

When I cut/paste a paragraph to move it to another section of text, the footnotes are completely disappearing. They are REAL footnotes (made using the reference tab). I've been revising documents as a writer using Word for my entire career. Why is this suddenly happening, and how do I fix it??

Please! I have a deadline!

I'm doing some additional tests:

I can't cut/paste the footnote in any way. If I cut and paste just a footnote, it doesn't work. I can delete them, but I can't move them. I've never seen this happen before!

Also seeing for the first time: when I cut/paste a paragraph and make changes to it, it's inserting dashes in words randomly, as if they were previously split over two lines.

Answer 1

With Track Changes enabled, footnote numbering may be incorrect, until you accept or reject the changes.

The fact that footnotes are lost completely would suggest that you are pasting as unformatted text. When pasting, do you see the Paste Options button? Which format is preselected there after you pasted? Also, which paste formats are set as the defaults in File >Options > Advanced?

Answer 2

You're correct, but I was mistaken. The original document is still missing all the numbers, even when I accept all changes. When I opened a document in a different computer, my testing showed that it worked correctly. I have changed my original post

So are you saying that a particular document is affected by these symptoms?

Or is the behavior different depending on which Word installation opens the document?

  

Also seeing for the first time: when I cut/paste a paragraph and make changes to it, it's inserting dashes in words randomly, as if they were previously split over two lines.

Could you show an example of this, for example a screen shot?