Figured it out. My normal.dot was corrupt. Thanks!

"Suzanne S. Barnhill" wrote:

When you click one of these buttons or press one of the shortcuts, you are
doing one of two things:

1. Applying the formatting to selected text.

2. Applying the formatting to any text you type from that point on.

In some versions of Word, it is sufficient to click in a word and press
Ctrl+B to bold it; this does not work in recent versions unless you have
"When selecting, automatically select entire word" checked on the Edit tab
of Tools | Options (and this option can cause problems in selecting parts of
words, so I prefer to leave it unchecked). You can still select the word by
double-clicking.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
Word MVP FAQ site: http://word.mvps.org
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.

"rocketman60" wrote in message
...
Recently, the "on the fly" bolding, italiczing and underlining stopped
working on all my documents. What I mean is that if while I am typing a
document, press Ctrl+B, U or I, the button on the toolbar appears to show
that I pressed the key but then it immediately turns itself off. It does
the
same thing if I click on the button on the toolbar. However, if I select
the
text first then press Ctrl+B, it bolds the text. Is there an option that
I
may have inadvertently set. Please help.