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. Doug Robbins - MVP - Office Apps and Services 323.6K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2019-09-30T22:50:03+00:00

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  2. Doug Robbins - MVP - Office Apps and Services 323.6K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2019-09-30T22:46:52+00:00

    Here are screen captures of the Find and Replace dialogs in Word 2003, 2010 and Office 365 when CTRL+i is used to invoke the format criteria.

    I have the Complex scripts section in the Font dialog of all of the above versions.  I may be there because at one time or another, I have had various Middle Eastern, Asian languages installed (i.e. non-Latin text).  Do you have the Right-to-left and Left-to-right text direction facilities in the Paragraph dialog or on the ribbon

    Note, if the Format facility in the Find and Replace dialog is used to set the format criteria, and you have the Complex scripts section in the Font dialog, it is possible to set the criteria to either Font: Italic or Complex Script Font: Italic, or to both.

    If it is set to both, (which is what is done when the CTRL shortcut is used), it will of course only find text to which BOTH of the formats have been applied.

    A bit more testing reveals that if you use the Italic button in the Font section of the ribbon or invoke one of the built-in styles that are formatted as italic, both the Font: Italic and Complex Scripts Font: Italic attributes are applied to the text.  On the other hand, if you use the Font dialog to assign Italic font, using just the Font style dropdown in the Latin text section of the Font dialog, only that one attribute will be applied to the text.

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  3. Anonymous
    2019-09-30T22:36:41+00:00

    My initial reply to your posting was via my email, and I didn't yet notice your snapshot/images.  But I see them now, and I've never before seen or heard of this "Complex Script Font: Italic".  Now I understand why Rohn007 was asking about your version of Word and wondering if you had an add-on.   So again, thanks for that info and I'll investigate further what the "complex script" thing is all about.

    Robin Rice

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  4. Anonymous
    2019-09-30T22:28:17+00:00

    Oops!  My long block of text about this is not entirely correct.  In my third to last paragraph where I refer to past/old/archived documents (pre-June 2019), it appears that with the installation of new (June) update, the F/R works same on old documents as with newer documents.  That is,  if you search for bold attribute in F/R using Cntrl-b, it will find only those occurrences where bolding had been applied using Cntrl-b.  But will not find any bolding that was applied via formatting dialog box, or bold that was part of a style.    And likewise for italics.

    And, as with newer documents the same in older documents -- using F/R font dialog box for searching for bold and/or italic will find EVERY occurrence, not matter how applied. 

    But bottom line is the same, whether with old documents, or newer documents -- we now must use F/S font dialog box for setting up searches.

    (This does get confusing ... I trust I have this straight now.  I see that Doug Robbins refers to a concept that I am not familiar with, nor have ever seen before -- "Font: Italic Complex Script Font: Italic".   So I am curious to research what this "complex script" is all about.)

    Robin Rice

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