exporting footnotes or endnotes

April 28, 2010 11:42 PM

How can I export just my footnotes/endnotes in MS Word? Without any numbers next to them, just the text?

One idea was that I can turn them into endnotes and can print just those endnote pages, but (a) the numbers are printed, (b) i dont want to print them, I want them in a word document (and without the footnote numbers).

Anyone have any ideas? Help!

thanks!

posted by jak68 to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

Is there a reason you can't just cut and paste into a new document? True you would have to delete the numbers by hand, but -- how many do you have? Anyway, that's what I'd do, but I'm no MS Word maven.
posted by Some1 at 12:22 AM on April 29, 2010

1. Copy all footnotes, paste into notepad.
2. Copy from notepad, paste into a new word document.
3. Hit ctrl-H.
4. In Find and Replace window, type "^#^#^# " in the Find box. Include one ^# for each of the digits in your highest footnote. So if your footnotes go up to 350, you would have three, as above. After those, include the number of spaces for a default footnote. (In most cases it is one.) Leave the Replace box blank. Hit replace all.
5. In Find and Replace window, type "^#^# " in the Find box (removing one digit). Leave Replace box blank. Hit replace all.
6. In Find and Replace window, type "^# " in the Find box (removing one digit). Leave Replace box blank. Hit replace all.
7. Fin.
posted by kingjoeshmoe at 12:46 AM on April 29, 2010

Best answer: I do tricks like this all the time. Forgive for not having gone to my work computer and tried this out, but here's the suggestion: click copy-all on your fn or en portion of file (whichever); save all; paste into new file. I believe they'll all have the number "1" attached to them as the note number (if you paste all notes into a new file, that's what happens, since they all freak out because the "main text" is no longer assoc'd and their little brains can't figure out what number they are). Then in the new file do a find/replace and choose the special character ^e or ^f in the "find" box. Then delete all. Those "1"s should disappear.
posted by yazi at 12:49 AM on April 29, 2010

if mine works, it beats heck out of kingjoeshmoe's routine. Try it first, since it takes about 97 seconds.
posted by yazi at 12:50 AM on April 29, 2010

Seconding yazi: If you copy endnotes into excel, they lose their references and become [1], which means you can just do a simple find and replace, and then copy them somewhere else.
posted by MuffinMan at 1:36 AM on April 29, 2010

1. Select all endnotes
2. Copy
3. Paste as plain (unformatted) text into a new doc

The conversion leaves a couple of leading spaces in place of endnote number. To delete them, find all ^p followed by two spaces and replace with ^p followed by no spaces.
posted by pracowity at 3:45 AM on April 29, 2010

probably no one reading this still.

but problem with pracowity, above, is that if a person has actual scholarly citations, or any other kind of text that requires ital, underscore, etc., then pasting something as "plain text" kills all the formatting features.
posted by yazi at 5:12 PM on April 29, 2010

Response by poster: yazi, worked perfectly, and actually after tinkering with it most of the night i eventually arrived there on my own around 4am, lol. Came back to read your post and I went "D'oh". Many thanks.

yes, i didnt want to lose italics; also, in this case the endnote numbers were in roman numerals (i know, i know) so couldnt do a find on digits, either.
posted by jak68 at 8:34 PM on April 29, 2010

Response by poster: oh, and there were 950 footnotes in this mss, so any kind of manual editing didnt appeal :)
posted by jak68 at 8:35 PM on April 29, 2010