In LibreOffice Writer I am trying to (a) change all endnotes to footnotes (b) change formatting of all endnotes. I could easily do both in Word but can’t find any way in Writer. Can anyone help?
Please make your title short (a catch phrase). You have as much space as you want in the description to describe your problem and elaborate.
Do that edit both the title and the question.
There are three aspects in your question:
##Changing endnotes to footnotes
In Writer endnotes and footnotes are different objects and are managed separately. This means you can have both footnotes and endnotes in the same document.
You must change change the category of every note (or those you want to switch) to convert from one category to the other.
The only procedure I know of is to double-click on the footnote number at the bottom of the page. A dialog opens and you can click on a radio button for Footnote or Endnote.
##Changing “easily”
Well not exactly. As described above, you must click on the first note. The dialog shows two heavy arrows for navigating to previous/next note. But the process remains manual. Once again, the reason is to allow you to select which notes are fott- and which are end- individually.
##Formatting notes
This is the easy and powerful part. Writer is based on styles, a collection of formatting rules to be applied to paragraphs, runs of characters, frames, pages, … Styles are used to mark up document objects.
When you insert a note, the note content (in the bottom of the page is automatically styled (=marked up) as Endnote or Footnote depending in the category of the note. All you have to do to change the formatting of all notes at once is to customise the Endnote or Footnote paragraph style.
CAUTION! Changing the note category with the procedure above does not change the style. When you change the category, you must also restyle the note with the style drop-down menu to remain consistent.
Styles are the basis for the workflow in Writer. If you are not familiar with them, read the Writer Guide for an introduction.
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What about changing position of Footnotes to End of document? This can be done “en masse”. Footnotes and Endnotes will be in different pages. Anything more?
@LeroyG: OP asked for changing endnotes to footnotes. The position setting in Tools>Footnotes & Endnotes is applicable only to footnotes. Consequently, if OP’s notes are endnotes, he must first convert them to footnotes. After that, the position parameter will affect them.
@ajlittoz, You’re right. I got confused while learning different possibilities. But is there a practical difference between Footnotes located at the end of the document and Endnotes? Thanks.
@LeroyG: if you send footnotes at end of document, they will be collected in a page (or group of pages) styled Footnote. This page is separated from the document by a page break. Then you can have another page break to start a new group styled Endnote. Footnotes and endnotes keep separate even if you send them at end.
@ajlittoz, So, it appear that the difference having only Footnotes (at the end of document) or only Endnotes is merely conceptual. Choosing for Footnotes Position - End of document don’t allow restart counting per page or per chapter. Thanks again.
@LeroyG: I haven’t fully checked the differences. With EndNotes, you can’t manually insert anything within or after them (refer to the numerous questions here about how to add a heading before the endnotes). I don’t know if this is the same with footnotes at end (likely to be so).
The main difference is footnotes at end can always be reverted to footnotes at bottom of page.
For changing the formatting of the endnotes, with left mouse button, you can choose an option Footnotes and Endnotes to change the formatting.
I don’t know though if there is a easy way to change all endnotes to footnotes, but I guess there should be something.
I’ve found a less onerous way to convert from a document with endnote to one with footnotes. Anyway this works with an rtf document created in LibreOffice. Just import into Goog Docs. It seems that Goog Docs doesn’t do endnotes at all but only does footnotes. Anyway, when it imports my endnoted document it converts them all to footnotes - which I then downloaded back to my laptop again as an rtf file.
If your document is consistently styled (paragraph, character, page and others), you likely lose a lot of your formatting when exporting to RTF. Where formatting is high-valued, I wouldn’t recommend this hack.