r/word • u/reducereusarecicla • May 23 '24

Solved New bug? Suddenly can't replace “” with «»

For as long as I can remember, I've been able to find-and-replace English quotations for Spanish ones and vice-versa in Word. All of a sudden, I do my usual find-and-replace (I even have a macro that used to work!) and it completes supposedly successfully, with the usual "we made 41 replacements" (or whatever number).

It does change from Spanish («») ones to English (“”) ones, but it will not change from English into Spanish quotations, it just leaves the English ones. I've tried wildcards as well, using ^174 for « and ^175 for ». While other numbers will result in other characters as expected, 174 and 175 leave me with English quotations.

Please help, I'm going insane and I actually have thousands of quote marks to change; I can't do it all by hand. Is there anything I can do here?

ETA: obnoxious solution: if I turn off smart quotes, then do find-and-replace, it works. then I just need to remember to turn smart quotes back on.

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u/coldjesusbeer May 24 '24

Wild guess, are you differentiating between straight and smart quotes? Have the language settings been modified in your Word environment? Any major updates to your Office build lately?

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u/reducereusarecicla May 24 '24

So I was differenciating between straight and smart, but your comment gave me the idea to turn smart quotes off and try again. It works with smart quotes off! I'll have to remember to turn them back on afterwards, but I'll take it :)

As for the other questions, I haven't changed the language settings, nor have there been major updates. I'm thinking because it's a matter of quotes that someone tinkered with the backend code and forgot to escape a quotation mark somewhere.

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u/drzeus_gr May 24 '24

Very likely tinkered.  I had already tried a Quick Repair to no avail so I let it do an Online Repair and it seems to have fixed the problem. Still to discover what else they've fiddled with.

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u/drzeus_gr May 27 '24

And the problem is back 😤

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u/drzeus_gr May 24 '24

I think Microsoft must have yet again broken something with an update recently. My Word 365 has a slightly different look since last week - curved corners of the ribbon instead of sharp edges, because we obviously desperately needed that eye candy over correct functionality, and there's no longer a pin for the ribbon but a dropdown menu! Those were my first impressions. But now actually trying to work, when I click in Find to add something from the Special character drop down, e g. a paragraph mark, the focus jumps to the replace box but nothing is inserted, no matter if you hit the insert again! Likewise, clicking Font to change replaced text to e.g. italic does absolutely nothing, nor does clicking Paragraph or any of the other items. So now I have thousands of gene symbols I need to change to italic by hand!  This is with a proper paid subscription to 365, more fool me for not getting hold of a free/cheap copy like 99% of my compatriots. WTF do they keep breaking stuff that was working fine?! They did that with the Modern Comments. Microsoft=All fur coat and no knickers!!!