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. Stefan Blom 352.3K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2019-06-09T12:23:42+00:00

    Thanks for the follow-up. I haven't seen a difference with documents created before and after the June update. I think we'll have to look at one of your problem documents to get further with this...

    Could you share one of your problem documents via (say) OneDrive or Dropbox? Remove any sensitive content, upload the document, make it public and post a link here.

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  2. Anonymous
    2019-06-10T11:30:39+00:00

    All my documents prior to the software update last week are problem documents. In sharing some of them here for others to test my problem isn't so much sensitive material, it's that I don't own the copyright -- I edit other people's writing -- and I can't share it without their permission.

    However, I dug around and found a couple of documents that I wrote myself and uploaded them to Google Drive (https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1d0pnwDH3KZFvon2sFyOe4_5BwJZ52Dh9?usp=sharing). Document A is a book review written in 2006 or 2007 and is in .doc format. Document B was written around 2011 and is .docx format.

    Document B is the interesting one. It contains instances of bold, italics, underline (web links) and strikethrough. Using F&R I can find the strikethrough and the underline, but not the bold or italics.

    I don't know if it has any bearing: I'm in the UK and my default language is set to UK English.

    I'll be interested to see if anyone else can replicate this. Meanwhile, I may have to go back to my old non-subscription version of Word.

    PS. I tested an Excel spreadsheet this morning and I can find italics and bold in that okay.

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  3. Anonymous
    2019-06-10T13:06:30+00:00

    OK this is totally funky!

    I downloaded the 2 files, saved to local drive.

    Opened them in 2010.  Found both italics and bold, all occurrences I could see in both files.

    Closed files no save

    Opened again in 2010, could not find ANY bold OR italics!, closed no save

    Opened in 2016, could not find ANY bold or italics!

    Downloaded again, with different name

    Opened in 2016, could not find bold or italics in both files

    Opened in 2010, could not find bold or italics in both files.

    This is so freaky. I'm picking up my jaw from the floor.

    I then created a new blank file with random text. Applied bold and italics.  COULD NOT FIND EITHER!   aahhhh, "you" broke my installation .....

    Closed Word 2016, opened it again, created random text again, applied bold and italics. Found them again. Whew!

    What a relief.

    Tried your documents again, still no joy. I can't imagine what mechanism is at work here.

    Downloaded 3rd copy of files

    Closed opened Word 2016

    created random text, found bold

    opened copy 3 of your files, again could not find bold/italics.  I'm baffled.

    Still freaked!

    So you have one confirmation. I hope others can repeat this experience.

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  4. Anonymous
    2019-06-10T16:05:32+00:00

    Rohn007, you made me laugh, which is something.

    But your experiment is really worrying. My theory was that it was the new update to Office 365 last week (June 5th) that introduced this bug. You've been testing my documents on other versions of Word that presumably haven't been touched by the update last week.

    Have you checked that you can still find bold and italics in your own old documents after doing that experiment on mine?

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