Word and footnotes
A small challenge in using Microsoft Word popped up today, when I had a footnote that I wanted to apply to two separate table entries. I first tried the intuitive answer – copy the footnote reference number and paste it in the second location that I wanted. Nope! Next I tried the easy way out – I asked a coworker. Nope, nobody knew how to do it.
I finally threw my ego on my sword and looked in Help… and found it! A 6-step process to create a second reference to a footnote. Except it doesn’t format it correctly, though the page does tell you that problem… and if you can warn the user about a problem, you should correct the issue in the application. And the second reference doesn’t behave the same way on mouseover and may have its own peccadillos.
I started playing around with it, and found out that you can right-drag the second reference and choose “Link Here” and it can be duplicated to a third and fourth instance… but it doesn’t work if you right-drag the first footnote.
What do we learn from this?
- Consistency: If you’re going to give an option like the right-drag, make it behave correctly. The “Link Here” option, when used with a footnote reference, copies the footnote… which is the same behavior as a right-drag “Copy Here” has.
- Ease-of-use: Don’t make the user go through multiple (6!) steps when there is an easier way to deal with the issue. While the help entry provided the steps to the result I desired, a more helpful way of dealing with this situation would be to allow me to copy the reference number and then give me a smart tag that let me choose to [a] create a copy of the reference and footnote with a new number (the current action) or [b] create a second reference to the existing footnote. Or make the right-drag work.
- Completeness: Document that you can right-drag a second reference footnote to a new location and get the same result, and reference a link to that documentation in the original Help article to lead the user to all the possible feature uses.
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