Using the Highlight Tool | 2007 MicrosoftВ® Office System Inside Out (Bpg-Inside Out)

As in previous versions of Word, the Highlight tool is available for use in Word 2007, and its functionality remains the same. The Highlight tool in Word 2007 is included in the Font group on the Home tab and is also readily accessible on the Mini toolbar. This change streamlines the tool’s availability and avoids unnecessary repetition of the button in the interface, which was the case in earlier versions of Word.

The main idea behind highlighting is to call attention to important or questionable text in documents. Highlighting parts of a document works best when the document is viewed online, although you can use highlighting in printed documents if necessary. When you use the Highlight tool, the main tasks you’ll perform are adding, removing, finding, and replacing highlighting. The next few sections briefly describe these procedures.

Highlighting Information

You can apply highlighting to a single block of selected text or graphics, or you can apply highlighting to a series of text areas or graphics. To apply a single instance of highlighting to information, select the information and then click the Text Highlight button on the Mini toolbar or in the Font group on the Home tab. To apply highlighting to multiple blocks of information, click the Highlight tool, select the text or graphic you want to highlight, and then select the next item in the document you want to highlight. The Highlight tool continues to highlight information as you select it. To turn off highlighting, click the Text Highlight button again, or press Esc.

You can change the highlight color by clicking the arrow next to the Text Highlight button on the Home tab or the Mini toolbar and choosing a color from the palette. The color you choose becomes the default highlight color for future highlighting (until you select a different color). Choosing a different color does not affect the color of highlighting you’ve already applied to the document.

Note

Be sure to choose a light highlight color if you’re going to print your document with highlighted content, especially if the document will be printed in monochrome (including grayscale) or on a dot-matrix printer. If more than one person is going to be adding highlighting to a document, consider assigning highlight colors to each person or agree to standardize highlight colors to indicate a particular issue (for example, reviewers might use turquoise highlighting to specify that a page reference needs to be completed, bright green highlighting to draw attention to repeated information, and so forth).

Inside Out-Considering Browsers When Highlighting

If you save highlighted text as part of a Web page, Word stores the highlighting information as part of the Web page’s cascading style sheet (CSS). This information will be interpreted and displayed properly in Internet Explorer 3 and Netscape Navigator 4 and later versions, but earlier versions of those browsers (and other less widely used browsers) might not display the highlighting properly. If you’re not sure which browsers viewers will use to display your Web page, you should consider using another method to draw attention to the text For example, you could use a font color, create a graphic of the highlighted text, or build a table and color the text’s table cell to simulate a highlighted paragraph.

Removing Highlighting from Documents

You can remove the highlighting in a document when you no longer need to draw attention to the highlighted text or graphics. To remove highlighting, follow these steps.

Select the information you want to remove highlighting from, or press Ctrl+A to select the entire document.
Click the arrow next to the Text Highlight button and then choose No Color.

After you choose No Color, all instances of highlighting are removed from the selected text.

Note

You can display or hide highlighting (but not the text itself) on the screen and in a printed document without permanently removing the highlighting. To do so, click the Microsoft Office Button, Word Options, Display. In the Page Display Options section, clear the Show Highlighter Marks check box (the option is selected by default) and then click OK.

Finding Highlighted Items

If you want to jump from highlighted item to highlighted item, you can do so by using the Find And Replace dialog box. To find instances of highlighted text, follow these steps.

Click Find in the Editing group on the Home tab, or press Ctrl+F.
Click More to expand the Find tab.
Click Format, and then choose Highlight.
Click Find Next to jump to the next occurrence of highlighted text.

After Word finishes searching through the entire document, a dialog box appears that states that Word has finished searching the document. Click OK to complete the procedure.

Note

To clear the Highlight criteria from the Find What text box on the Find tab, click No Formatting in the Find And Replace dialog box.

Reformatting Highlighted Items with Another Highlight Color

You can change a single instance of a highlight color in a document, as well as change all instances of highlighting in a document to the same color. To change a single instance of a highlight color, choose another highlight color and then select the highlighted text.

To change the color of multiple instances of highlighting, you can use the Find And Replace dialog box. Using this technique, you can replace all existing highlighting (regardless of original highlight color) with a different color, as follows.

Click the Text Highlight Color arrow and select the color you want to assign to all highlighting.
Click Replace in the Editing group on the Home tab, or press Ctrl+H. The Find And Replace dialog box opens.
If necessary, click More to expand the Replace tab.
Make sure that no text appears in the Find What and Replace With boxes, position your insertion point in the Find What box, and then click Format and choose Highlight. The word Highlight should appear next to the Format label below the Find What box.
Click in the Replace With box and choose Format, Highlight.
Click Replace All, and then click OK in the message box that tells you how many replacements were made.
Click Close to close the Find And Replace dialog box.

In addition to replacing all highlighted text with a different color, you can use the preceding procedure to replace selected instances of highlighting with a new color. To do so, click Find Next instead of Replace All in step 6. You can then replace instances of highlighting with a new color on a case-by-case basis.