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. Suzanne S Barnhill 279.3K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2019-06-07T20:39:36+00:00

    There's no question it should be working. When you select the italic text, is the Italic button enabled? What does the font box show? Occasionally a font will have bold or italic variants that have been applied as direct formatting instead of by using the Bold and Italic buttons, and they might not be found by this search.

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  2. Anonymous
    2019-06-07T19:30:53+00:00

    No, Suzanne, none of the other search options are enabled (even though I'm confident of that I checked anyway). I don't expand that dialog unless I specifically need it. This is the way I've been using F&R for years, quite successfully.

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  3. Anonymous
    2019-06-07T17:26:50+00:00

    Thank you for replying, Sukie. I've been through all your points, documented as follows:

    Opening Word in safe mode makes no difference. A search for italics (or bold) in my test document does not find them.

    Copying the contents of the document to a new one (what editors call "maggying") makes no difference. I can still not find italics or bold.

    I have the most up-to-date build of Office (and Word). I checked the build number against the list at the link you supplied (although I didn't get my update until June 5th, not  June 3rd) (screenshot below)

    I'm not searching on keyword. I'm simply searching for formatting. So far, it's italics and bold that I've noticed. I've included two screenshots of searches done in particular document in which F&R won't find bold at all, and only finds one instance of italics (I applied that italics after June 5th). I've included screenshots below of my searches. I've been using this method to search for formatting for years with no issues.

    I'm in a huge editors Facebook group (over 6,000 members around the world) and I posted my problem there. Another editor had the same problem earlier this week and hasn't found a solution either.

    It seems to be able to find formatting (bold, italics) if that formatting has been applied since JUne 5th. So if I created a new document now, it will find italics and bold. But if I go back to a document I was working on earlier in the week, before June 5th, and look for italics I created previously or that was created by someone else, it won't find it.

    I tested a book manuscript I was working on in 2018 of nearly 200 pages. It would only find italics in tables in appendices at the end. It didn't find italics in the footnotes or in the main text.

    Re: search. If I try searching via 'Styles' in the dropdown menu of the "Find" dialogue, the character style Italic is not listed; it is listed in documents where I can find the italics.

    Bold search

    Italic search

    Software version

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