Fire up Microsoft Word, and then open the document to which you’d like to add footnotes (or create a new document if you’re just getting started). Switch to the “References” tab on Word’s Ribbon.
Here, you’ll find a bunch of useful features for annotating your text, including tools for inserting a table of contents, adding citations, and generating a bibliography. The second group on this tab contains the footnote and endnote features we want.
To add a footnote, place your insertion point in your text where you want the footnote to appear, and then click the “Insert Footnote” button.
Word adds a small superscript number where you placed the insertion point.
And then immediately shifts focus to the footnote pane and places the insertion point at your new footnote, so you can start typing it right away.
Footnotes appear at the bottom of the page beneath a short horizontal line. Each time you add a footnote on this page, another number will be added to the list.
Once you’ve added your footnotes, you can hover your cursor over each sentence’s reference marker to see a preview of the footnote within the text.
You can also quickly tab between footnotes in both the main text and the footnote list at the bottom of the page by clicking the “Next Footnote” button in the navigation bar.
Or, click the dropdown menu arrow on the “Next Footnote” button to select a different navigation option. You can choose to go to the previous footnote or navigate to the next or previous endnote.
The steps for inserting endnotes are essentially the same. Place your insertion point where you’d to annotate, and then click the “Insert Endnote” button on the “References” tab of Word’s Ribbon.
Just like with footnotes, Word attaches a superscript number containing an endnote. But this time, the list of notes it generates appears at the end of the current section or the end of the document (you can customize where they appear, and we’ll talk more about that in a bit).