Can't see shading on documents received

[susant09]

When other people send me documents where they have shaded the text, (not the
characters a different color, but the background behind the characters a
different color) I cannot see their shading. It is just black text for me. I
can shade my own documents and change the color of the text and they can see
mine. I can also see my own shading when they send my document back to me but
I cannot see any new shading they add to my document. I just can't figure
this out. Thanks for any help.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Perhaps they have used highlighting rather than text shading. Do you have
"Highlight" checked on the View tab of Tools | Options?

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
http://word.mvps.org

 

[susant09]

Yes, that was exactly it! Thank you so much. I can see all their colored
notes now. I have to read up on what "highlighting" is next.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Highlighting is applied with the Highlight tool. A very limited range of
colors (most of them useless) is available, so people mostly just use
yellow. Its use actually predates the era when a very wide range of colors
was available for text shading (in fact, it may be that it wasn't always
possible to shade selected text as opposed to whole paragraphs or table
cells--I don't recall).

For many versions I think the Highlight tool was on the toolbar by default,
but I guess it's fallen out of use (or at least out of favor). It is one of
the buttons available for the Formatting toolbar if you use the "Add or
Remove Buttons" feature. If you do have it, it will have the letters "ab"
and a cylinder meant to look like a highlighter. The bar below indicates
the current highlight color (yellow by default, I think). You can click on
that tool and then swipe it over text to highlight it.

It is far from obvious how to remove highlighting, and that may be one
reason users are wary of it. There's no "Remove Highlight" command, and
changing the highlight color to None has no effect. You have to change the
color to None and then reswipe the highlighted text. Or you can just turn
off the display of highlighting in the Options dialog (as you've seen). If
it's not displayed, it also will not print.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
http://word.mvps.org

 

[susant09]

You are just so nice. Thanks a bunch for the extra help. I really appreciate
it.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

I'm glad you found it helpful.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
http://word.mvps.org