Word: `search` can't find text in text boxes

[greysteil]

Provide required information needed to triage your issue

In Word, text in text boxes (w:txbxContent in the OOXML) cannot be found using search(...) on a document's body or any of its ranges. This text is findable when using Word manually (i.e., using the search bar).

Your Environment

• Platform [PC desktop, Mac, iOS, Office on the web]: Mac
• Host [Excel, Word, PowerPoint, etc.]: Word
• Office version number: 16.86 (24060916)
• Operating System: Mac OS 14.3
• Browser (if using Office on the web): N/A

Expected behavior

search(...) should behave the same via Office.js as it does when using the search bar in Word. It should find text inside text boxes.

Current behavior

search(...) does not find any text within text boxes.

Steps to reproduce

1. Add a text box to a document
2. Attempt to search for the text in the text box using context.document.body.search(...)
3. Observe that the text in the text box cannot be found

Context

Our add-in includes two features that are negatively affected by this:

• We let users click links in our add-in to scroll to the relevant text in the document. These links do not work for text in text boxes, because search(...) is unable to find the text
• We let users insert tracked changes into their documents. This does not work for text in text boxes, because search(...) is unable to find the text and return a Range object for us to update

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[microsoft-github-policy-service[bot]]

Thank you for letting us know about this issue. We will take a look shortly. Thanks.

[shanshanzheng-dev]

Hi @greysteil Thanks for reporting this issue, we'll be looking into this and will report back if we have a suggestion for you. Thanks.

[jipyua]

@greysteil thanks for reaching out, for the existing search api, generally we haven't provided support to content in text box yet. So this is so far a by-design behavior. We track Office Add-in feature requests on our Microsoft 365 Developer Platform Ideas Forum. Please add your request there. Feature requests on are considered when we go through our planning process. Thanks.

[microsoft-github-policy-service[bot]]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it is marked as needing author feedback but has not had any activity for 4 days. It will be closed if no further activity occurs within 3 days of this comment. Thank you for your interest in Office Add-ins!