Word no longer finding italics and bold

Anonymous
2019-06-07T12:34:05+00:00

Just in the last day or so, Word no longer finds italics or bold from the Find or Find & Replace dialogue box. I should qualify that: it will find them in some of documents but not in all of them.

I work as a professional book editor and have been using Word for many years and consider myself to be fairly experienced. Yesterday, I was able to find all italics in a properly formatted manuscript (using the styles pane) and highlight all instances of italics. Today, in the same document F&R tells me there are no italics in the document, despite me staring at them onscreen (still highlighted in yellow). It's the same in many other documents today (but not all).

I can't find italics either if I search using 'Style' in the Find box.

I'm using the downloaded version of Office 365 on an up-to-date Windows 10 PC. Any ideas as to a solution. Being able to find italics and bold is crucial to my work.

Microsoft 365 and Office | Word | For home | Windows

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Anonymous
2019-11-19T07:02:11+00:00

It seems the issue is now fixed! I've had some major updates over the last few weeks and I'm now able to find italics and bold again just like before.  My Office 365 Business version number is 16.0.12130.20344.

Many thanks to everyone for interim solutions and to those who reported it.

Averill

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  1. Anonymous
    2019-08-28T21:48:29+00:00

    Thanks, Karen. I may very well do that. In the meantime, I've been using your excellent WordPad suggestion to find italics and highlight it in yellow (in case I lose it again and need to reapply).

    Yeah, I'm checking in periodically too. I'm in a few huge Facebook groups of professional editors (over 6,000 members in one of them) and I'm amazed that more people haven't reported this issue. I wonder why this is only happening for some of us.

    Averill

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  2. Anonymous
    2019-08-26T17:21:36+00:00

    Averill, I gave up and reverted to a previous version of Office. It made everything work again.

    Follow the instructions here:

    https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/2770432/how-to-revert-to-an-earlier-version-of-office-2013-or-office-2016-clic

    I used the May 14 v1904 build 11601.20204 for Office 2016 (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/OfficeUpdates/update-history-office-2019).  After I reverted, I disabled auto updates. This replaced v1907 build 11901.20218 Click-to-run.

    It also kept all my preferences, so I didn't have to set up my environment to my liking again.

    I'll check back periodically to see if I can begin updating again, but right now functionality trumps all else.

    --Karen

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  3. Anonymous
    2019-08-21T22:53:58+00:00

    @Doug Robbins: Thanks much for your generous & prompt offer.  Unfortunately, I can't share the document, and haven't the time to try to generate one that will show the problem.  (Similar to OP, a new document doesn't.)  I'm satisfied with getting any updates this thread might provide.

    It would be nice to get confirmation of something that is intertwined with the problem I described.  It seems that F&R cannot find letters in equations unless formatting has been applied to them (including removing the italics normally applied to variables).  Is that true for others?  (Sorry if that amounts to highjacking this thread.)

    @JB Morrison: Although I've had some success reaching Microsoft themselves in the Excel Community, I'm not sure how closely they monitor this one.  Be sure to register your complaint with the smiley/frowny menu in Word, which I've been told is the most effective way to report a bug (versus troubleshoot a problem).

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  4. Anonymous
    2019-08-21T01:19:53+00:00

    I'm seeing a different problem, but similar enough that I expect it is related.  For me, searching for a search term with NO formatting specified results in finding only the unformatted examples, but not italics examples.  If I specify italics in the search, then I correctly find the italicized examples and not the unformatted ones.  As with others here, the problem doesn't occur in a freshly created file, and is inconsistent in other files.

    Disappointing that there has been no action this long after first report.  Any news that wasn't posted here?

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