[Solved] Missing footnotes after saving Word document as odt

[Carlvdmerwe]

Hi Guys
My wife emailed a word doc (.docx) to her Mac and then worked on it using open office. She saved the edited file as an .odt file.

The problem she has after reopening the saved file is as follows:

All the new footnotes she added have disappeared. The original footnotes that were already there also disappeared after saving the document.
Only a number now appears in the footnote.

When viewing the document in google doc you don't even see the footnotes on the page. It seems like they have simply disappeared as if they were never added/typed. It was a lot of data added in these notes as they were "source references" to verify the authenticity of the text in the document.

Has anyone ever had this happen and is there a way to recover the text/data. She has tried opening the saved file in open office and word but there are no footnotes to be seen.

Any advice would be much appreciated.
Thank you
Regards

[Carlvdmerwe]

Correction : Apache Open Office 4.1.2 used to save the doc

[RoryOF]

So there are three formats - .docx, .odt and Google docs? Using multiple formats, particularly .docx, is bad practice. Files coming from .docx to .odt almost always have problems.

On her computer she could try using PhotoRec to undelete any temporary working files;

The computer reading the .docx file should also be able to directly read the .odt file; unfortunately Microsoft only support a limited subset of that format - complain to them about that limited support.

[John_Ha]

See [Tutorial] Differences between Writer and MS Word files for why you should always work in and save files as .odt.

[RoryOF]

A similar problem is described in
https://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question ... footnotes/

[Carlvdmerwe]

We found the footnotes!!

Thank you for all the feedback and assistance!!

For some reason all the footnotes got pushed together and added to 2 pages, as the last pages in the document.
Not sure why saving from from word.docx to openoffice.odt would have done this but we have found them.
We just needed to scroll to the very last page of a very long document.

-- So go look at the bottom --

Not sure if this helps anyone but thank you for all the response to this!
Much appreciated!!
Thank you

[RoryOF]

Maybe, for whatever reason, the footnotes are being treated as endnotes, or as footnotes placed to end of document (as allowed in OpenOffice). Internal inspection of the .docx xml might establish the details of what was happening.

[Carlvdmerwe]

Could be - Good idea - Thanks