Disappearing footnotes MSWord view

General comments and questions. Technical support.
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Shan
Posts: 57
Joined: Sun Jan 22, 2012 9:44 am

Disappearing footnotes MSWord view

Post by Shan »

My academic supervisor just sent me very bad insulting feedback telling me to provide references on what I write. I have worked with this supervisor for 4 years and my work has never failed to show plenty of footnote references. So I was insulted!

I replied patiently stating that
a) there were 12 footnotes per page on average and
b) knowing she uses MSWord I tested the file by opening it in MSWord Viewer to check - I found the footnotes showed up correctly.
Their next email said that the file in MSWord on their computer shows no footnotes at all.

Has anyone else had this problem? Any ideas why it has happened? She has always been ebale to see my footnotes before.
I have used Atlantis for going on 15 years and the only compatibility issues with MSWord I have found is MSWord users have more limited colours, and sometimes don't see pictures I have added.
Never before had someone say footnotes don't display.
Robert
Posts: 1890
Joined: Fri Aug 15, 2003 8:27 pm

Post by Robert »

Which version of MS Word is your academic supervisor using?
rstroud
Posts: 225
Joined: Sun Mar 04, 2012 3:07 pm
Location: Tennessee
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Post by rstroud »

I was a moderator for many years on a screenwriting board, where I answered a lot of questions about software.

Some frustrating things were:

People asked questions about a program but did not provide version numbers nor the operating system (screenwriting programs almost always have Windows and Mac versions).

But the most frustrating thing of all was that someone would present a genuine problem and then never answer back when I asked a question or offered a possible solution. Sigh.

Anyway, that Microsoft Word Viewer may or may not be reliable. It was actually discontinued in 2007, though apparently security updates continued until 2017, when Microsoft officially retired it entirely (all of this is from Wikipedia).

Also, the document in question with the footnotes ... Was it saved as .docx or .doc or .rtf?

The most likely explanation for the problem is that the academic supervisor was using a different Word version than she had previously been using (apparently she had had no difficulties with the submitted documents in the past).

It would really be nice to know the conclusion of this story.
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