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. Doug Robbins - MVP - Office Apps and Services 323.6K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2019-09-30T22:50:03+00:00

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  2. Doug Robbins - MVP - Office Apps and Services 323.6K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2019-09-30T22:46:52+00:00

    Here are screen captures of the Find and Replace dialogs in Word 2003, 2010 and Office 365 when CTRL+i is used to invoke the format criteria.

    I have the Complex scripts section in the Font dialog of all of the above versions.  I may be there because at one time or another, I have had various Middle Eastern, Asian languages installed (i.e. non-Latin text).  Do you have the Right-to-left and Left-to-right text direction facilities in the Paragraph dialog or on the ribbon

    Note, if the Format facility in the Find and Replace dialog is used to set the format criteria, and you have the Complex scripts section in the Font dialog, it is possible to set the criteria to either Font: Italic or Complex Script Font: Italic, or to both.

    If it is set to both, (which is what is done when the CTRL shortcut is used), it will of course only find text to which BOTH of the formats have been applied.

    A bit more testing reveals that if you use the Italic button in the Font section of the ribbon or invoke one of the built-in styles that are formatted as italic, both the Font: Italic and Complex Scripts Font: Italic attributes are applied to the text.  On the other hand, if you use the Font dialog to assign Italic font, using just the Font style dropdown in the Latin text section of the Font dialog, only that one attribute will be applied to the text.

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  3. Doug Robbins - MVP - Office Apps and Services 323.6K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2019-09-30T03:18:09+00:00

    When searching for formatting the Format button in the Find and Replace dialog should always be used.

    Using the CTRL+i or CTRL+b shortcuts to set "format" in the Find and Replace dialog cannot be relied upon to find all instances of the apparent relevant formatting and that has been the case since at least Word 2003.

    When you use the shortcut to apply formatting in  the Find and Replace dialog, the format that will be looked for is "Font Italic, Complex Script Font Italic"

    and if the text was formatted via the Font dialog, it would have  to be formatted by making the selections as shown below to comply with that formatting criteria

    When the Format facility in the Find and Replace dialog is used to set the format search criteria, it does not matter how the formatting was applied to the text in the document.

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  4. Anonymous
    2019-09-30T00:16:23+00:00

    Averill:  I have continued to ponder this issue (several hours now).  I have found something interesting (albeit is unfortunate):

    (forgive for any following info that is obvious and/or redundant)

    There are two basic ways to apply bold attribute:  (1) type Cntrl-b (or use "B" toolbar button in "Font" portion of ribbon)   ... or ... (2)  use Font Dialog Box to set Bold attribute.   [Naturally, method (1) is most convenient and quickest method.]

    Likewise, for Finding/Searching for bold attribute, there are also two ways, both ways using "Find and Replace" dialog box:  (A) type Cntrl-b  and under "Find what:" it will say "Format: Font: Bold"       .... or .... (B) use "Format" button at bottom left of dialog box to bring up "Font" dialog box and select "Bold" for the search.  After "OK",  F/R dialog box will also say "Format: Font: Bold".

    Sooooo, you'd think there would be no difference between methods (1) & (2) for applying Bold attribute, and likewise no difference between methods (A) and (B) for finding bold attribute -- there certainly was no difference before the June update (I am assuming).   But NOW, going forward, it appears that Method (B) for Searching will in fact find ALL Bolding, no matter which way is used to apply bolding [methods (1) or (2)].  But Method (A) for searching for Bold will ONLY find the Bolding that was applied using method (1) [cntrl-b or "B" toolbar button].

    This is definitely, in my opinion, a bug in the MS-Word program; however, the Bold attribute can still be searched for, just not as conveniently as before by using Cntrl-b. 

    For past/old/archived documents (pre-June 2019?), it appears that no matter how bold attribute was applied to text, the only way to Find/Search for them is by using method (B) Font dialog box from within the F/S dialog box.

    I haven't fully tested this out yet for Italics, but I assume that everything above applies also for Italic attribute.

    (I reviewed all of the past "replies" to your initial query, and I didn't see anything that described a similar answer as above.  If this doesn't work for you, I would be interested to know.)

    Robin Rice

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