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![](data:image/svg+xml, %3Csvg xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2000/svg' height='64' class='font-weight-bold' style='font: 600 30.11764705882353px "SegoeUI", Arial' width='64'%3E%3Ccircle fill='hsl(128, 8%, 22%)' cx='32' cy='32' r='32' /%3E%3Ctext x='50%25' y='55%25' dominant-baseline='middle' text-anchor='middle' fill='%23FFF' %3EA%3C/text%3E%3C/svg%3E)
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.
A family of Microsoft word processing software products for creating web, email, and print documents.
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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
JB:
Since you've already spend the time to create and test them would you mind sharing them here?
I'll offer you a "trade". This free download was created by a professional document proofreader and editor. It is a (huge) collection of macros he uses. He has a few macros that search for bold, alone and with other attributes.
! Computer Tools for Editors (and Proofreaders) (macros)http://www.archivepub.co.uk/book.html
by Paul Beverley, LCGI
This is a freely distributable set of computer tools (macros) for use with Word, programmed by and for editors and proofreaders. *(Writers and authors will also benefit from using some of these macros because they have to read and edit their own texts to try to make them more consistent.)*There are over 400 macros in the book, with more being added. Here’s a list of the twelve Word tools (macros or groups of macros) that save me most time as an editor and enable me to produce a better quality of work.
But bottom line is the same, whether with old documents, or newer documents -- we now must use F/S font dialog box for setting up searches.
Robin Rice
Great bit of analysis from Robin Rice, getting down to the core issue.
This issue forced me into creating 3 macros (variations of the example in my previous post) with buttons added to my Quick Access Toolbar, one each for Bold, Italic and Bold & Italic.
It would appear that setting up the search using VBA in a macro is the equivalent of using the font dialog box.
I now have 'one-click' access to each search, and to be honest, I don't know why I didn't do it earlier.
They are so handy I created others for Superscript, Subscript and Underline.
J B Morrison
My initial reply to your posting was via my email, and I didn't yet notice your snapshot/images. But I see them now, and I've never before seen or heard of this "Complex Script Font: Italic". Now I understand why Rohn007 was asking about your version of Word and wondering if you had an add-on. So again, thanks for that info and I'll investigate further what the "complex script" thing is all about.
Robin Rice
Oops! My long block of text about this is not entirely correct. In my third to last paragraph where I refer to past/old/archived documents (pre-June 2019), it appears that with the installation of new (June) update, the F/R works same on old documents as with newer documents. That is, if you search for bold attribute in F/R using Cntrl-b, it will find only those occurrences where bolding had been applied using Cntrl-b. But will not find any bolding that was applied via formatting dialog box, or bold that was part of a style. And likewise for italics.
And, as with newer documents the same in older documents -- using F/R font dialog box for searching for bold and/or italic will find EVERY occurrence, not matter how applied.
But bottom line is the same, whether with old documents, or newer documents -- we now must use F/S font dialog box for setting up searches.
(This does get confusing ... I trust I have this straight now. I see that Doug Robbins refers to a concept that I am not familiar with, nor have ever seen before -- "Font: Italic Complex Script Font: Italic". So I am curious to research what this "complex script" is all about.)
Robin Rice