I’m writing academic articles using LO but find there’s no function such as Ctrl+a in MS Word for choosing all footnotes or endnotes at the same time. I need this fixed urgently or I’ll be forced to go back to using Word.
Please advise me via email if this is developed.
Dougie64
Hello @Dougie64, See select all footnotes even when footnote text has various styles.
If you tell what do you need to do with all footnotes, may be some user could share a workaround.
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This older answer might still apply but Alternative Search and Replace doesn’t look as if it has been updated for a while.
Of course, if it were just for formatting footnotes and endntes in an ODT document then you would just do it in Styles in a few tens of seconds.
@Dougie64: from your comments after the other question, it appears your purpose is a formatting task. If you wrote your article in a “professional” way, i.e. exclusively with styles, you don’t need to track notes individually but only to change the common style of all notes. I write “common” because to differentiate notes you can create a derived style from the common one, usually Footnote, to override only a few attributes. Changing the common ancestor will apply to all notes, including those styled with derivatives (provided your change is not about any overriding attribute).
The fact you request selecting all footnotes shows that your document contains a lot of direct formatting, which leads to “formatting hell”.
Ctrl+H, tick paragraph styles, select Footnote, Find next or Find all. What do you want to do with them that can’t be done?
Earnest Al,
That was brilliant. I’m brand new to LO Writer. I’m a dummy at knowing how it works. I followed your instructions and was able to select ALL footnotes that were in 12 font. I needed them in 10 font. Then I used the drop-down menu in the task bar for a 10 font. And bingo! There it was. You have been such a great help.
Dougie64
Sorry, I thought from your silence that you wanted to copy the footnotes. I have misguided you then. What you should have done is open the sidebar, selected Styles (paragraph styles), found Footnotes, right-clicked on the style and selected Modify Style. Change the font size there, all the Footnotes would have changed.
What you have done here is to make the old footnotes at 10 point, while new footnotes will be added at the old size.
If the document was created in Word then the footnotes might not have a style as Word has extremely limited capabilities.
The Styles section in the Writer Guide should really be compulsory reading
Earnest Al,
How do I open the sidebar as I don’t have one on the side of my documents? I have task bars at the top of the pages.
I’ll take your advise and read the Styles section of the Writer Guide.
I live across the ditch from you in Brisbane, Qld.
Dougie64
Hi Dougie64. The Styles section of the sidebar can be opened with F11 (probably Fn+F11 if you have a laptop with the function keys re-assigned to non-important tasks)
If you have already changed the font size of the footnotes manually then we need to remove the direct formatting first as it will over-ride any Style changes. Ctrl+H, tick paragraph styles, select Footnote, Find All. In the menu click Format > Clear direct formatting. The footnotes will revert to their old size.
Next we need to change the Style of the footnotes. Press F11 to open the Styles sidebar. Right-click on Footnotes (in paragraph styles, the leftmost icon under Styles ) and select Modify , click on the Font tab and change the size to 10pt, OK. All the footnotes current and future will be 10 pt. Cheers, Al
To change the Style of the footnotes. Press F11 to open the Styles sidebar. Right-click on Footnotes (in paragraph styles, the leftmost icon under Styles ) and select Modify , click on the Font tab and change the size to 10pt, OK. All the footnotes current and future will be 10 pt. Other formatting of footnotes should be done this way.
Avoid direct formatting of footnotes unless you want a massive manual effort later on if changes need to be made.
To copy footnotes to somewhere else you can press Ctrl+H, tick paragraph styles, select Footnote, Find next or Find all, Ctrl+C and paste elsewhere. Cheers, Al