Docs Help

Watch a video on inserting footnotes.

To insert footnotes in your document, please follow the directions below:

1. In the place you want to insert a footnote, click the Insert menu and select Footnote.
2. At that point, a text box will appear in the document margin where you can type your footnote. When you're finished, click outside the box to make it inactive. To edit the footnote, simply click it again and continue typing

Footnotes appear on-screen in the document margin and at the bottom of the page when printed. You'll be able to see how the footnotes will appear when printed by selecting Print (Ctrl+P) or Download file as... PDF from the File menu. There will also be a footnote marker within the actual document designated by a pound sign (#). You can drag and drop a footnote anywhere you'd like in the document by simply clicking on this pound sign and dragging.

Deleting, collapsing and hiding footnotes:

• Deleting: To delete a footnote, click the drop-down menu in the footnote text box header and choose Delete footnote. It may take a few seconds for the footnote to disappear. In that time, you can undo this delete by clicking the undo button in the footnote. You can also click undo in the toolbar to bring back the deleted footnote.
• Collapsing: To collapse a footnote, simply click the top border of the footnote; click it again to uncollapse it.
• Hiding: If you prefer to not see your footnotes in the margin, you can hide all of them by selecting Footnote from the View menu.

Please note that, at this time, documents downloaded as PDFs will display footnotes at the bottom of the page (as when printed from Google Docs). Documents that are downloaded as Microsoft Word, OpenOffice, RTF and HTML files will display footnotes as endnotes, that is at the end of your document, rather than at the bottom of the page.