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How to select more highlight colors in Word

If you color-code the text in your Word documents, you may feel constrained by the 15 Highlight Color choices:

Highlight colors

Fortunately, there's another command available if you want to expand your color palette: Shading. The button is not far from the Highlight Color selector on the Word toolbar: It's just about seven spots to the right over in the Paragraph section:

Shading colors

You can use More Colors to select from the expanded Colors dialog:

Standard Colors

Or even enter custom RGB values if you like:

Custom Colors

This feature is available in both Word 2007 and Word 2010.

A couple of small cautions: If you use my tip for hiding highlighter marks, any text with Shading will still be displayed and printed. Also, you'll have to remove Shading separately from Highlighting - simply select your target text and choose No Color for each.

Suzanne

Comments

  • Anonymous
    August 18, 2011
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    September 30, 2011
    Thank you for this very clear info.

  • Anonymous
    February 24, 2012
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    June 13, 2012
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    September 25, 2012
    I wish Microsoft would increase color options to include some pastel colors under the highlighting tool!  It is difficult to see black font with some of the available colors.  I don't want to go through the fuss of using shading mechanism....  Microsoft-pls provide an option to custom these colors.  Thank you!.  

  • Anonymous
    October 13, 2012
    ^Did you try selecting the text you wanted to shade first before shading? Because that worked for me.

  • Anonymous
    November 01, 2012
    I tried the above and also had the entire paragraph highlighted, not a section of text in the paragraph

  • Anonymous
    November 26, 2012
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    January 15, 2013
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    January 15, 2013
    ^Did you try selecting the text you wanted to shade first before shading? Because that worked for me. It worked for me too

  • Anonymous
    January 23, 2013
    Awesome! Just what I was looking for and found it just a google search away :) Truly grateful :)

  • Anonymous
    April 09, 2013
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    April 10, 2013
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    May 01, 2013
    Thanks so much.  I've been looking for a way to access more highlighter colors.  Your tip is great!

  • Anonymous
    May 24, 2013
    Great tip - even older versions of Microsoft Word have the shading tool in the format tab!

  • Anonymous
    June 11, 2013
    Thank you very much... imagine not noticing this all these decades ;-)

  • Anonymous
    July 12, 2013
    Great, it works! Just what I was searching. Thank you!

  • Anonymous
    July 18, 2013
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    August 10, 2013
    Brilliant - exactly what I was looking for, and so easy!

  • Anonymous
    October 05, 2013
    VERY HELPFUL FOR MY PHD THESIS

  • Anonymous
    October 18, 2013
    Thank you so much, this is so helpful for my thesis

  • Anonymous
    October 26, 2013
    Thank you so much! For so long I have despaired over those old colors.

  • Anonymous
    November 20, 2013
    my documents contains text highlighted with different colors ( let say yellow and blu ) How can select only text highlighted with yellow ? thanks