Are you just unable to find the controls to toggle bold and italics, or are the controls not responding?

If the former, you can find them by clicking Home on the ribbon, then look in the Font section (the B and I buttons). You can also toggle "on the fly" by pressing Ctrl+B (the Ctrl key and the B key at the same time) to turn boldfacing on or off, Ctrl+I for italics, and Ctrl+U for underlining.

If the latter, I'm not sure what the problem could be.