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
    2019-10-04T08:27:52+00:00

    I have been informed by the Office team that a bug report has been filed and that the issue is being investigated.

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  2. Stefan Blom 352.3K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2019-09-30T22:53:10+00:00

    I can confirm that "Complex scripts" as well as other settings in the Font and Paragraph dialog boxes will be added if you add certain languages (right-to-left languages, I believe). You don't even have to enable those languages (that is, you don't have to install full support for them); as long as they have been added to the list of editing languages the additional features will be available in Word.

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  3. Anonymous
    2019-06-07T15:05:47+00:00

    Hi Averill,

    Thank you for your message in this forum.

    I have tested it with the latest version of Word and it works fine.(For the latest version of Office, you can refer to this article: Update history for Office 365 ProPlus)

    So I would give you the suggestions below and hope that will help you:

    1. You can try to open Word in safe mode to check if the same problem will occur. This is useful when you need to open a file that you can't under normal mode because the application is crashing or if you need help in identifying an add-in or extension that may be causing a problem on startup. As steps shown below:

            Right-click the Start button (lower-left corner) in Windows, and click Run.

            In the Run box, type one of the command:  Word: winword /safe

    1. If the issue only occurs on specific files, you can create a new document, then you can copy the content of them into new document to check if the same problem will occur.

    If the problem persists, I want to confirm the information below with you:

    1. Could you provide the version of your Word? You can go to Word File > Account > Product Information and provide the screenshot of it.(Please remove your email address)
    2. Do all the other styles have the same problem? You can use the other styles of font to search the keyword to check if the same problem will occur.
    3. At the same time, could you provide the screenshot of your search in the problematic document ?

    Best Regards,

    Sukie

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  4. Anonymous
    2019-06-07T12:44:06+00:00

    I should add that newly added italics can be found, but italics that was added to a document more than a few days ago isn't.

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