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. Suzanne S Barnhill 279.3K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2019-06-07T19:14:14+00:00

    I notice your screen shots don't show the entire Find dialog. Click More>> to expand the dialog to make sure that you haven't enabled any of the search options. I don't know how any of them would make a difference in searching for font formatting, but it's worth a look.

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  2. Anonymous
    2019-06-07T19:30:53+00:00

    No, Suzanne, none of the other search options are enabled (even though I'm confident of that I checked anyway). I don't expand that dialog unless I specifically need it. This is the way I've been using F&R for years, quite successfully.

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  3. Suzanne S Barnhill 279.3K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2019-06-07T20:39:36+00:00

    There's no question it should be working. When you select the italic text, is the Italic button enabled? What does the font box show? Occasionally a font will have bold or italic variants that have been applied as direct formatting instead of by using the Bold and Italic buttons, and they might not be found by this search.

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  4. Stefan Blom 352.3K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2019-06-07T21:35:04+00:00

    To add to what Suzanne has suggested, I would try with a different font, and see if that makes a difference.

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