Microsoft Word for Mac: text highlighting too "light"

Anonymous
2020-01-02T16:01:02+00:00

Hi, 

I had an Office 365 Personal subscription active on my Macbook Air since November 2019, then I decided to switch and buy the Office Home & Student 2019 version a few weeks after the expiration date.

Right after the subscription ended, I started to see the highlighting of the text in Microsoft Word really light, as you can see from the image below:

Instead of the normal colour, much darker. Everything was working fine until the subscription expired and I thought that the issue was related to the expiration of the subscription, but when I purchase and installed the Office Home & Student 2019 version nothing changed.

I tried to delete completely all files from the previous installation of MS Word, also tried to edit the colour in Preferences > Highlight colour - but nothing changed in Word. 

Other apps, web browser or text editors works fine and the colour is "normal", only in Word the highlighting is too "light".

Is there a way to solve this issue?

Thank you in advance for your help.

Microsoft 365 and Office | Word | For home | Windows

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Anonymous
2020-08-22T18:35:51+00:00

I’m not the originator to this issue but i do know the solution. On your Mac go to: System Preferences - Accessibility - Display. There should be a slider bar move it all to the left. For some reason this setting was changed. Once you’ve moved it to normal, Word highlighting works.

Thanks for this suggestion, I have tried this fix and it does change the contrast on most elements of the computer display, but does not change the highlighting in Word for Mac which is almost invisible. 

It is very strange. I'm on 16.40 like you are and when I made the change (I do not know how the slider was originally moved) and moved the slider to the normal position the highlighting came back. A couple of factors in my case:

  • I had the older version of MS Office 2016 for Mac which had no problems with highlighting
  • I upgraded my MacBook Pro Mid 2015 to Catalina
  • I then bought a license for MS Office 2019 for Mac and encountered the highlighting contrast issue. And I found that the System Preference/Accessibility/Display had been moved off of normal. This was a solution from another user to move it back
  • Moving the slider to normal the problem was instantly solved.

So the question when you tried the fix was your slider off of Normal? If not then my solution is not the same for your bug. But if it was off of normal try a reboot (if you haven't already) and see if that works.

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  1. Anonymous
    2021-01-14T10:42:32+00:00

    Within this discussion thread there is a solution that worked for me - it would be handy if this was the first answer I had found on this thread...:

    On your Mac go to: System Preferences - Accessibility - Display. Change the Display Contrast slider bar all the way to the left - to NORMAL.

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  2. Anonymous
    2020-10-19T11:58:12+00:00

    Hi Gian,

    I also have this problem (for about the last 12 months) but was informed of a work-around that works. It is to change the background colour of the document. Do this in the Design tab:

    I usually pick a very light grey from the “More colours” palette, for example, Mercury:

    (Sorry about the size of the graphic, I can't seem to change it).

    You'll be able to see your mouse highlighting much better with a different background colour. The only minor problem is to remember to change the background colour back before sharing the document with anyone else.

    Good luck!

    Paul

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  3. Anonymous
    2020-08-22T17:49:40+00:00

    I’m not the originator to this issue but i do know the solution. On your Mac go to: System Preferences - Accessibility - Display. There should be a slider bar move it all to the left. For some reason this setting was changed. Once you’ve moved it to normal, Word highlighting works.

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  4. Anonymous
    2020-04-15T16:24:07+00:00

    Thank you for the suggestion I will report this infuriating issue to Microsoft.

    Hi

    Since this question was first asked, several others have reported the same behavior. It's not widespread, but it does affect certain Macs.

    To all affected, please click the Smile button in the upper right corner of Word document while you have text selected. Send a report to Microsoft. The more reports, the more likely this problem will get fixed in an update.

    Unfortunately, reporting this (serious!) issue to Microsoft like explained above does not help. Also in the latest version of Microsoft Word 2016 for MAC (16.36), this annoying problem is still present on my new MacBook Pro 16", after months and months of feedbacks sent to Microsoft. The best thing is to revert back to version 16.29 (incredible!!), but I find astonishing the absence of a solution, stil today, to what seems to be a trivial problem!

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