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
    2019-08-21T01:54:54+00:00

    If you send me a copy of a document with which you have the issue, referencing this thread in the covering email message, I will investigate it.

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  2. 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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  3. Anonymous
    2019-07-30T17:08:34+00:00

    This is driving me insane and I have a deadline! I deadline I tell you! I'm also having problems with the F&R dialog box not properly reflecting with writing underneath that formatting or case restrictions are applied. I don't use the mouse and the endless toggling has me down.

    I got italic/bold formatting to work by cutting and pasting the entire document into WordPad and then cutting and pasting it back into Word. However, this was a simple document--no embedded field codes or Styles, which many of my clients use to typeset their documents.

    I had a catastrophic computer failure and reinstalled Word 2016 yesterday. All this is new since then. Previously input formatting won't show, but items I just now formatting do.

    I BEG SOMEONE TO FIX THIS.

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  4. Anonymous
    2019-07-29T10:17:15+00:00

    Same for me, just now. Can't find italics, even though it's highlighted in the ribbon. Following.

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