I cannot remove highlights from Word 2010 documents.

Anonymous
2010-10-22T18:56:45+00:00

Highlights in Word 2010

I cannot remove highlights from Word 2010 documents.

Microsoft 365 and Office | Word | For home | Windows

Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.

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Stefan Blom 352K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
2011-08-20T12:51:19+00:00

For what it's worth, Ctrl+SpaceBar clears direct character formatting, and Ctrl+Q clears direct paragraph formatting applied to text.

In other words, it seems as if some sort of character formatting was applied to your text.

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Anonymous
2011-08-21T03:39:28+00:00

It sounds like shading was applied to a part of a paragraph.  It is then character formatting and Ctrl+spacebar will clear it. If shading is applied to the entire paragraph, it's paragraph formatting.  Ctrl+spacebar won't remove it,  but Ctrl+q will.

Pam

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Anonymous
2012-07-16T01:21:02+00:00

The replies above are useless for this very common complaint. Here's how to solve the problem:

PCs: Copy the highlighted text. Paste it with the icon that has the arrow on it. This preserves formatting EXCEPT highlighting is removed.

Macs: Copy the highlighted text. Use "Paste Preserving Formatting". Same result as above.

MICROSOFT: Get on the stick and address this pernicious bug! Remove Highlighting should be made to work. The product looks ridiculous otherwise. It's such an impressive product otherwise. Please get rid of this silliness.

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Suzanne S Barnhill 279.2K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
2012-06-19T17:38:51+00:00

You seem to have a lot of questions not related to the subject of the original post. It would be better for you to start a new thread and ask your specific questions about, for example, AutoText entries (which basically are created the same way as in past versions, using Alt+F3).

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  1. Anonymous
    2015-01-01T21:27:47+00:00

    The JPG screen capture is "nice", but not what I would hope for when asking for a "sample doc". My definition of a sample doc is just that a DOC, or DOCX or DOCM (etc), that contains example text that demonstrates the issue.  If you can't recreate the issue by copy and pasting into a new blank file, you can make a copy of the problem file and then deleting most of the text to leave just the problem area.  And at the same time you would remove any sensitive/private information in the example.

    The reason I would ask for a sample file is to try possible fixes to find the "right" one, aka one that actually works on the sample.

    The reason you have those unrecognized styles is that word will create required styles in your document when copy and paste from other documents that use styles you don't have.  The simplest fix for that problem is to use Paste Special and select "Text Only" so that the new text will use the style in the current paragraph (usually that will be the "Normal" style). This way you avoid creating these random new styles. 

    But, since you already have they styles, you can get rid of them by using the style pane to select all examples of the offending style then applying one of your own styles to all of the selected text.

    Since you mention docx, I'll guess you are using one of the ribbon versions. So the general steps you would follow are:

    1. In the Home tab > Styles group, click on the Styles "dialog launcher button" (the little icon on the extreme right end of the Styles group name bar).  This displays the Styles Pane
    2. Right click on an Offending style
    3. Select "Select all"
    4. (after several seconds (or minutes <grin>) word will eventually "select" all occurrences of the offending style
    5. then locate and click on a desired style in the Styles pane to apply that style to all occurrences
    6. Right click on the offending style
    7. Select "delete style"
    8. repeat until all offending styles are fixed.

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