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First of all, I tried responding to another posters similar problem, but I cannot get my response to post, so I'm trying a fresh thread.
Out of nowhere a few days ago, the Navigation Pane in Word will stop showing search ("Find") results and will show only the number of hits, but not show what they are. Word is set for "incremental find," I have the latest versions of both Word 365 and Windows11, and until this started I have never ever had this problem before and I've been using Word for decades.
Here's what happens: I open the doc, the search function works as it should in the Navigation Pane, then suddenly it doesn't. The Navigation Pane is still open and maybe it'll show how many instances of whatever I'm searching for there are, but it doesn't show the actual text. Then it does other odd things, like showing "No" (instead of "None") if there are no hits to the search term. If I exit the doc and every other doc I have open, then go back into the doc, it'll work again, but then stop again, sometimes after only one search. This has happened on several docs. It's not about a corrupted file.
I need to see search results in the Navigation Pane since I don't have all day to search for each item individually. I have no idea how to fix this, and there's no useful guidance on this forum so far. I cannot use another word processing software since I'm freelancing for a company that uses Word.
A family of Microsoft word processing software products for creating web, email, and print documents.
Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.
That was happening to me. I stumbled across the fix for my situation: drag and collapse size of the Navigation column, then you might see it. Worked for me!
Thank you, it worked for me.
I'm a little shocked that this worked - but it did! Thanks :)
This was helping me (thank you) but now even this workaround is failing.
I've been merely slightly resizing (just making it a teensy bit narrower, for example) the Navigation Pane, not collapsing it or manipulating it in any other way, and this continues to work for me. That doesn't mean the search function doesn't revert to not working properly at some point even after I've done this--it does. Then I have to do it again.
It's extremely annoying that this is happening at all--something that never used to happen--but I find Word has more and more bugs. Don't even get me started on Modern Comments, which have tremendously screwed up comments. I've had to find several workarounds there as well. And Word's inability to properly hyphenate common words is a joke (alt-hough, anyone?).
But I'm forced to use Word since I freelance and the places I work for all use Word. And all have odd problems with it, btw. Wait'll you run into Content Creation weirdness. That was the new oddity of the week last week.