I wrote a 400-page document (a novel) using all direct formatting of text.
So, in order to switch to Style formatting, I selected all and clicked Ctrl
+ Spacebar, then applied Styles.
But now all my italics are gone!
There were several hundred words here and there italicized for emphasis.

Fortunately I have several backup copies of the original document, so I can
do a search for "italics" and find all the instances in the original
document. But how do I apply italics to the corresponding text in the newly
Styled document?
It will take hours and hours to do it word by individual word.

I tried creating a macro that searches for italics in the orig. doc then
copies the text to the clipboard, then searches for the corresponding text
in the new doc, then applies italics to it. Then another click would repeat
the process for the next instance of italics. I was planning on clicking the
macro for each instance. Several hundred clicks would still be easier than
all that searching manually.

But when I paste the search string into the Find box, it gets "hardwired"
into the macro code and I can never progress to the next instance because
the search always looks for the text I pasted into the Find box the first
time.

Okay, so I don't suppose this makes much sense. But I promise you that if
you make a copy of a document with italics in it, and then do a Ctrl +
Spacebar on it and then try to re-italicize all the words from the original,
you will see what I mean.

SF