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
    2019-09-29T03:53:24+00:00

    Averill:  I retired in January of this year, else I would have noticed this also in early June.  But have just now encountered this problem, and I am shocked -- shocked!  that this would occur in MS-Word.  I have thousands of archived MS-Word files, and all of the ones I have tested give the same problem and not able to Search for Bold and/or Italic attribute.   I have a personal MS-Word project begun last year that I am just now resuming, and becoming aware of this problem is very depressing.  :(    I think I will attempt to revert to previous version of Office.  I hope that works.  I will be monitoring progress on a solution to this problem.  Thank you so much for your efforts on this.

    Robin Rice

    (former Word Processor for 25+ years)

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  2. Stefan Blom 352.3K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2019-08-29T10:58:31+00:00

    If/when I receive a notification, I will post an update here.

    As Rohn007 wrote, Microsoft staff rarely (almost never) posts updates in this forum.

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  3. Anonymous
    2019-08-29T07:12:36+00:00

    How or will Microsoft notify you or us when a fix is issued? 

    MS doesn't like to admit that they have bugs in their software. If they can get away with it they will avoid even mentioning the fix.

    Most likely they won't notify us here at all. Unless we get lucky and a MS Staffer posts a her, outside of their job responsibilities, to let us know

    They MAY include a one line incomprehensible mention in the documentation for that update, if/when they bother to publish it.

    Yes, that is a rather pessimistic (but realistic) assessment of MS's likely action, based on 30 years of experience ...

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  4. Anonymous
    2019-08-29T06:30:14+00:00

    I hope this helps until Microsoft admit there is an issue, investigate it and fix it.

    Note that the issue has been filed as a bug by Microsoft (see a previous reply of mine). 

    That is good news.

    How or will Microsoft notify you or us when a fix is issued?

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