what's the dfference between shading and highlighting

[Guest]

I would like to know if the hihlight button on the formatting toolar is a
shortcut to selecting a fill colour within the shading tab of the Borders and
Shading dialog box.

 

[Tony Jollans]

For most practical purposes the differences don't really matter, but the two
are different.

 

[Jay Freedman]

It does matter in two circumstances.

The more usual reason to choose shading is that highlighting (the one on the
toolbar) allows only 15 different colors, of which about half are too dark
to let you read the highlighted text unless you also change the text color
to something that contrasts with it. Shading gives you the entire gamut of
RGB colors to choose from when none of the highlighting colors will do, or
when you need more than the handful that are usable. If you do this often,
it's worth creating a macro to make shading as easy to apply as using the
highlighting button.

The other difference occurs when you're using a macro to manipulate the
document. You need completely different code to handle shading than to
handle highlighting.

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP
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[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

There are definitely differences between Highlighting and Shading. Here are
a few:

1. Highlighting is limited to 16 "colors" (including "None"). Shading (in
Word 2000 and above) uses 24-bit color ("millions of colors").

2. Shading can be part of a paragraph or character style; highlighting
can't.

3. You can use Edit | Find to search for highlighting (though not a specific
color) but not shading (unless it's applied by a particular style).

4. Shading can be applied to paragraphs, table cells, or selected text;
highlighting is applied only to selected text.

5. Shading applied as direct text or paragraph formatting can be removed
using Ctrl+Spacebar or Ctrl+Q, respectively; highlighting can't.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA

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