How do I change the color of Strikethrough without changing the color of the text?

Hello MikeBaca,

Thank you for your response. I have found that imposing AutoShapes over text to be unreliable because depending upon what you do, (moving text, inserting text) or perhaps something else that I cannot now recall, the AutoShapes can move! They are NOT locked to the text.

I would also like to add that both the medical and the legal profession have used different strikethrough colours.

In the law (in the U.K.) a first amendment of a court pleading is carried out in red, with red overstrike for deleted text and red underline (underscore) for new inserted text. This is because you are not permitted to actually remove text from a pleading once submitted to the court and served on the other party.

If the pleading later requires subsequent additional amendment, this is then termed a "Re-amendment" and then the colour goes to green. 

(If I recall correctly, I believe the next amendment is termed a "re-re-amendment" and goes to purple.)

I really cannot understand why Microsoft cannot provide such a simple (in non-technical terms a least) option, as colour options for strikethrough.

Regards,

Ray333

In 2003 in Microsoft Word add a blank page below your working document and keep your cursor on that blank page and then enable your toolbar ­Drawing and go to AutoShapes and chooseLines and (pick) line. And what you will see on your blank page is a large text box saying to CREATE YOUR DRAWING HERE. Outside of that text box or below, draw your line and the large text box will go away, then you can Format your AutoShape line to any shape, color, size or copy/paste, and move to over the sentence you are trying to Strikethrough. PRINTING: Before Printing - Check your File/Print Preview and if your strikethrough lines don’t show up in the Print Preview mode, your new Strikethrough lines will not print out. And-If-That-Is-So, From your main toolbar chooseTools/Options/Print/and (checkmark) Drawing objects and Check yourFile/Print Preview before printing. Hope this helps? Don’t forget toFile/Save and to Create-On.

Following my own suggestion in a previous post, I now keep a document in my quick links type of toolbar.  The document has a couple of shapes (from Insert > Shapes) that I frequently use: a red transparent oval and red horizontal lines of various lengths.  When I want to use red strikethroughs, I copy and paste one of the lines that approximates the length I need, and then adjust the line length and position.  (In case anyone wants to try that, you may want to use the shift/right or left arrow key combination to expands or contract the length equally from both ends.)

I wonder what the "cost" to Microsoft of providing color strikethroughs would be (resources, hours, etc.).

Hey K:

While using the word "nonsense" may have been a little strong, and yes I will concede that using a red strikethrough is more user friendly, I will re-iterate it is a low demand feature. The average home user has only had access to color printers at a reasonable price for ca. 7 years ...  Businesses maybe a few years longer. Before that all printouts were B&W.  Even today, despite "paperless office" initiatives most people deal with printed paper rather than online copies.

Think back, the origin of "red strikethrough" probably goes all the way back to the 1800's or earlier with paper and pen records. It was easy enough to pick up a red pen and a ruler to make the strikethrough.  Even with typewriters it was relatively easy to buy a 2 color ribbon and backspace, switch ribbon color selection and strikethrough in red, switch color back to black.   Those options did not exist with the high volume line printers, did not exist with consumer dot-matrix printers, did not exist with laser jet printers. Sure, it has been a possibility with color inkjet printers since the mid 1980s, but early inkjet printers had other issues.

The simple reality is that the health industry, with this legal requirement, is just not a large enough part of MS's market to push developement of a solution. MS develops for the lowest common denominator, and slowly pushes out to fringe market requirements later.  Sorry, but that is the reality of Office.

Sure WordPerfect may have had the feature back in the 80's. But back then the market was several orders of magnitude smaller and it made sense for them to focus on the specific needs of specialist markets like medicine.