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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.
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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
Robin:
Nice bit of investigation and debugging.
Doug:
That's interesting news. I've been using Word / Office since long before 2003. This is the first time I've heard of this MS "Feature" in the Find dialog. As a professional programmer "in theory" there should be no difference how the find attribute is set. "Bold is bold". But then again, as a programmer I have seen how seemingly identical things are not, when you look at them through a computer.
Now that we've been forced to accept the unwanted, the question is how far does this issue extend. Can we no longer trust the Find dialog to find formatting? I can't trust it if it does not work consistently. This is an example of it being inconsistent ...
So, apparently Find is inconsistent for Bold and Italics font attributes, depending on how the attribute is defined within the Find dialog. Do you know if this issue applies to any other Find criteria?
What version of Word did you capture that Find image. I wonder if your <CTL><I> has been customized some way. Your example explains why find does not work for you. In my 2010 and 2016 when I use <CTL><I> to define italics in the find dialog, I just get "Font: Italic" ...
This is what I see in my 2016
What do you see when you use the shortcut for Bold?
Frankly you appear to have something funky going on in your installation. An addon? I've never seen that "Complex" section in the Font dialog. This is basically all I've EVER seen, regardless of the version
Hi Robin
Yes, that works for me now. Bit of a shame as it's a lot more long-winded if you're having to do these kinds of searches a lot, but many thanks for posting your fine discovery!
regards,
Very interesting! And also news to me. I've been going merrily along these past couple of decades using cntrl-I & cntrl-B extensively in Find and Replace with nary a problem. I suppose the adage of "ignorance is bliss" can apply to me here. :) Since I didn't know that it wasn't reliable, it always seemed to work fine for me. But I know better now for sure. At any rate, going forward, I will be pretty much forced to always go with the Format button/dialog box. Won't be to hard to get used to, I suppose. Thanks again.
Robin
When searching for formatting the Format button in the Find and Replace dialog should always be used.
Using the CTRL+i or CTRL+b shortcuts to set "format" in the Find and Replace dialog cannot be relied upon to find all instances of the apparent relevant formatting and that has been the case since at least Word 2003.
When you use the shortcut to apply formatting in the Find and Replace dialog, the format that will be looked for is "Font Italic, Complex Script Font Italic"
and if the text was formatted via the Font dialog, it would have to be formatted by making the selections as shown below to comply with that formatting criteria
When the Format facility in the Find and Replace dialog is used to set the format search criteria, it does not matter how the formatting was applied to the text in the document.