Forum Discussion
Ronald Smith
Sep 18, 2018Copper Contributor
Find and Replace in Word has bugs after latest update to Windows
After the latest update to Windows, Find-and-Replace stopped working correctly for many cases. In particular, if you try to specify font attributes in a replace, they are usually ignored. Also, the R...
- Sep 19, 2018
Magic happened. I'm not sure what it was, but everything started working again about 3am this morning. I couldn't sleep and doing some work that included running my app. Imagine my surprise when everything worked.
I've looked and can't see anything that updated.
Oh well, another mystery. But, I'll take it. I was getting desperate.
Keri Schmitt
Sep 18, 2018Copper Contributor
Yes! I've noticed the following new behavior in the past few days:
- Replacing any text with the same text formatted differently results in just the original text and original formatting. This is true whether using wildcards or not. In a sample document that contains the text "One two three four three seven eight nine," where the first instance of "three" is bold and the second one is not, replacing all bold instances of "three" with unbolded "three" results in no visible change but a report of 7 replacements made.
- Using wildcards, replacing all instances of "( )([0-9])" with "\1 \2" inserts the three spaces, but then the selection doesn't advance, so instead of adding three spaces to each instance, it adds lots of spaces to just the first instance.
- There's now apparently a limit to the number of replacements that will be done during one Replace All. This is true whether triggered manually or by VBA. In the previous bullet point, the inserted spaces took up about two lines before stopping. In a 188-page document with lots of double line breaks, using wildcards to replace "(^13)(^13)" with "\1" results in 126 pages of correct replacements and 62 pages of no replacements. Previously this size document worked just fine.
Our office uses Find-and-Replace in LOTS of VBA procedures every single day, and many of those procedures are used by people who need to click a button and have it run flawlessly, so this is a problem for us.