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
    2019-07-08T06:37:58+00:00

    Thanks for that tip, ZbyněkMichálek!

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  2. Stefan Blom 352.3K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2019-07-07T21:15:59+00:00

    When you are the the person who started a thread you can always mark and unmark posts as Answers (with the exception that you can't mark your own posts).

    Note that Microsoft normally won't post updates on bug fixes in this forum, though.

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  3. Doug Robbins - MVP - Office Apps and Services 323.6K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2019-07-07T10:45:28+00:00

    I have no problem using the Find and Replace facility to find either Italic or Bold text in a 64-bit installation of Office 365 - Version 1906 (build 11727.20230 Click-to-Run).

    Are you using that version?

    If you send me a copy of a document in which the Find does not work, referencing this thread in the covering email message, I will investigate the issue.

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  4. Anonymous
    2019-07-07T10:07:26+00:00

    You can use LibreOffice for finding and replacing italics or bold.

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