Find/Change changing items to Black instead of spot colour

[clairer75645299]

I'm trying to find all objects with a Black stroke in my document and change them to a spot colour (called Text Black in my document), but Find/Change isn't changing them – or rather it is 'changing' them to Black (if I Find objects with another coloured stroke – or fill – and ask InDesign to change it to Text Black using the Find/Change function, it changes the colour to Black). I can manually change the colour, but this is very time consuming as there are a lot of lines.

What am I doing wrong? Is it something to do with the spot colour? I've attached a screen grab of the 'before' and 'after' changing the colour, and a screengrab of my spot colour set-up.

[Luke Jennings3]

It's working for me here.

Can you confirm the spot color is appearing in your swatches?

Try changing the Text Black swatch to red, as a test.

Export to PDF and check the colors in Acrobat using Output Preview.

Try creating a new document and testing it there, if it works, you may need to export your document as IDML and then open and save it as .indd

[Willi Adelberger]

For your future workflow it would be good to work complete with object styles which will allow you to make global changes with a single click. Create styles once and use them in all documents. Use the very same name. It is valid not only for object styles, but also for Paragraph, Character, Table and Cell styles. You can save them in Libraries, or if you want to have them available in all documents, import them in your InDesign Style Panels. Every new document will have the same styles.

Why use the same name?

If you have identical style names (they can have different properties in different documents), you can build some automatisation, like style tagging from improted files, tocs, etc. 

Paragraph styles are also important for object styles as they are a part of them.

[Brad @ Roaring Mouse]

Confirmed. Something's up.

I was able to see the same issue as yourself using CC2021. Saved the file back to CC2020 and it worked fine.

[Steve Werner · Accepted solution]

It looks like you're using InDesign CC 2021.

You should try the new Find/Change Color feature introduced in this version. See the "Colour" tab in the Find/Change dialog.

Here's the link to the Help file:

https://helpx.adobe.com/indesign/using/find-change.html#locate-colors