[Solved] Changing footnotes to endnotes

[turtle67]

I am working on a document which already has a big set of Footnotes. I need to change these into Endnotes. At the moment I can't see any way of doing this apart from saving the content of each Footnote in a separate document; deleting the Footnote from my document; inserting an Endnote instead; and copying the saved content into the new Endnote. All this one Footnote/Endnote at a time! Is there any way of a) highlighting all the footnotes at once and b) changing all of them from Footnotes to Endnotes.

Any help greatly appreciated.

[foxcole]

I am working on a document which already has a big set of Footnotes. I need to change these into Endnotes. At the moment I can't see any way of doing this apart from saving the content of each Footnote in a separate document; deleting the Footnote from my document; inserting an Endnote instead; and copying the saved content into the new Endnote. All this one Footnote/Endnote at a time! Is there any way of a) highlighting all the footnotes at once and b) changing all of them from Footnotes to Endnotes.

Is it just that you need these all at the end of the document? If so, would it work to choose Tools> Footnotes> Footnotes tab, and change the position to "End of document"?

If not... only slightly easier than your method is to right-click on a footnote anchor and in the shortcut menu, choose Footnote. That opens a little dialog in which you can select Endnote to change the footnote, then click the black arrows to move through each successive or preceding footnote to do the same. (You should right-click the first or the last footnote anchor, because once it reaches the end of the document, it won't wrap back through the beginning, or vice versa.)

I could have sworn someone had written a macro that automated this, but I can't find it. I know one was created for Word a while back, and I thought I pointed to that as an example or comparison... but I'm not finding it yet. I'll keep looking.

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

It is not so difficult to do manually.

Select the first footnote index anchor, right-click, and select Footnote to edit footnotes and change them to endnotes, or vice versa.

Use the scroll arrows to scroll right through the document, editing each footnote in turn. This is an easy way to change footnotes to endnotes or vice versa. It takes about one second for each note if you use the access key (Alter E) on the dialogue plus the mouse on the scroll buttons, so 120 notes = about 2 minutes.

[foxcole]

That's the method I suggested, Bhikkhu... but if there are hundreds of footnotes in a document, it's a tedious chore that involves a lot of mouse clicks (or keystrokes). There should be a way to automate it.

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

A macro would be nice, but the manual approach is the quickest I found yet. Using the access key combined with the mouse makes it much easier. A few hundred notes is no sweat, but I wouldn't like to do a thousand or more.

[thnidu]

Whew! Works for me, Mac OS X on macbook air, except there's no right-click equivalent that works to start it: have to go to the Edit menu.

[JohnLBalto]

Thank you for this solution.
"choose Tools> Footnotes> Footnotes tab, and change the position to "End of document"