Hi Debra,

Where to begin??  ... Let's just throw out the existing code and start
over from a statement of the problem.

You have a series of phrases, separated by hyphens, stored in the
custom property. You want to search the document for each occurrence
of each phrase, and change them to italic.

There's a function in VBA, called Split(), that's specifically made
for breaking down a string into separate substrings, given the
separator character. The results go into a Variant variable as a sort
of array. You can look up this function in the Help.

Then you can use the For Each ... Next loop construction to step
through all the substrings in the Variant array. Each substring gets
assigned to the .Text parameter of the .Find, and then you do a
ReplaceAll to change that substring to italic wherever it occurs. The
.Replacement.Text parameter is set to the code "^&" which means "the
same text as in .Text".

So the complete macro is this:

Public Sub ItalicOffences()
   Dim myArray As Variant
   Dim substr As Variant
   Dim myRg As Range
   
   myArray = Split(ActiveDocument. _
       CustomDocumentProperties("Offence"), "-")
   
   For Each substr In myArray
       If Len(substr) > 0 Then
           Set myRg = ActiveDocument.Range
           With myRg.Find
               .ClearFormatting
               .Text = substr
               .Replacement.Text = "^&"
               .Replacement.Font.Italic = True
               .Format = True
               .Forward = True
               .Wrap = wdFindContinue
               .MatchCase = False
               .MatchWildcards = False
               .Execute Replace:=wdReplaceAll
           End With
       End If
   Next substr
End Sub

Note: It appears from your code that there's something in the first
three or four characters of the custom property that you aren't using
as a search phrase. The Split function can't deal with that, so you
should remove those characters and deal with them some other way.

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP         FAQ: http://word.mvps.org

Debra,

It appears that all you are doing with your introductory string construction
is to try to find anything beteen the first pair of hypens.  No matter what
you do with the find and replace part the search string is still the text
between the first pair of hyphens.

Try this:

Sub ScratchMacro()

Dim oFld As Field
Dim myRange As Range

For Each oFld In ActiveDocument.Fields

If oFld.Type = wdFieldDocProperty Then
 oFld.Select
 Set myRange = Selection.Range

 myRange.Find.Replacement.Font.Italic = True

 With myRange.Find
   .Text = "-*-"
   .Replacement.Text = "^&"
   .Forward = True
   .Wrap = wdFindStop
   .MatchWildcards = True
   .Format = True
   .Execute Replace:=wdReplaceAll
 End With
End If
Next
Selection.GoTo what:=wdGoToBookmark, Name:="Start"
End Sub