a gremlin stole my font color and font size buttons

Up until yesterday I had buttons that I could use to emphasize text by making them different colors and sizes. Then those buttons disappeared. When I go into tinymce advanced, it tells me that I can drag and drop those two buttons into the toolbars, but when I do it, then save my changes, nothing happens.
I then tried someone’s suggestion of going back into ftp and making the changes in the php file, but that doesn’t work either. I’ve saved changes in my permalinks, cleared my cache, etc., but the changes don’t happen.
Also, I know I need to upgrade to the latest version of WordPress. Someone suggested I do it manually, but since I’m new at this, I don’t understand all of the instructions.
Can anyone help me?