Strong Response, Weak Software
I think I remember with whom I was chatting the other day — I think I remember, but I won’t guess for the record — but one of my friends was trying to wrestle some appropriately-paginated footnotes out of Microsoft Word. I remember thinking, years and years ago, that I couldn’t believe that MSFT couldn’t make Word perform this simple task effectively; over the years, I’ve seen countless student papers and journal submissions whose footnotes were offset by a page in a way characteristic of Word. If my friend’s colorfully-expressed testimony provides reliable evidence, Microsoft still ships an expensive word processor that misplaces footnotes.
I don’t use Word, so I can’t speak from experience as a user, but as a reader and editor, I find that absolutely infuriating. There may well be a workaround, but users shouldn’’t have to figure that out. Word processors exist in order (among their very most brain-dead basic tasks) to place footnotes at the bottom of the page to which the notes pertain. If Microsoft can’t make the global standard word processor perform that function adequately, they should stop development on every other feature until they get that right.