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
    2020-08-22T18:50:29+00:00

    Microsoft has been warned more than once.

    This is what I posted in this thread in January of this year you can find it on p. 1 of these comments.

    "I would like to know if anyone has found a solution. I have a Mac and my version of Word is [was] 16.33. My license for Office 365 is active.

    About a month or more ago I spent a very long time with a Microsoft person on the phone who worked with me to try to change this problem, screen share included.

    Even he couldn't figure it out and he works for Microsoft. So eventually with his help I reinstalled an earlier version of Word and it solved my problem.

    There have been several updates since that time (of which I am CONSTANTLY reminded) so today I decided the problem MUST have been fixed by now and updated my version.

    It has NOT been fixed.

    This is so very frustrating because I can barely see a color when selecting text to delete or move.  Like the person above, I tried changing my Mac settings, all to no avail.

    This is NOT a problem on any other apps, or even in Excel, so it is a specific Word question.

    PLEASE someone take this seriously or I will have to stop using Word.

    Thanks you in advance."

    I still have version 16.29 installed - none of the versions after that fixed the problem for me.

    CPG

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  2. Anonymous
    2020-08-22T17:16:11+00:00

    This problem as far as I can tell is an internal bug in the MS Word for Mac 2019. I'm surprised that no one officially (maybe I'm misreading this) from Microsoft has acknowledged this problem. I'm on version 16.39 and this has been showing up since Ver 16.32. This bug does not show up in MS Excel for Mac 2019 Ver 16.39, highlighting is occurring as it has since I've been using MS Excel.

    So when is this going to be fixed?

    I have Word for Mac  version 16.40 and the problem is still not solved. It is extremely frustrating that Microsoft has not yet addressed this issue.  Microsoft- PAY ATTENTION!!!!

    Elaine

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  3. Anonymous
    2020-06-03T23:16:37+00:00

    Thanks for the suggestion, but no luck here either. Perhaps I did something wrong, but this looked like it was going to make my highlight color black, but in fact it turned out white! (Maybe the system was too smart to do black over black text?) So this actually made it even worse.

    Thanks for the suggestion, on my Mac this method changed the highlight color on everything (emails, notes etc.) but did not seem to change the invisible highlighter in Word. Still looking for a Microsoft miracle!

    Go to System Preferences/General/Highlight Color 

    Choose Other and the Color Circle will appear,

    In the Color Spectrum bring it to the darkest option.

    It is not a perfect solution, nor one that I would expect from Microsoft, but this darkens the highlight to a point that you can actually work comfortably.

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  4. Anonymous
    2020-06-03T19:56:14+00:00

    Thanks for the suggestion, on my Mac this method changed the highlight color on everything (emails, notes etc.) but did not seem to change the invisible highlighter in Word. Still looking for a Microsoft miracle!

    Go to System Preferences/General/Highlight Color 

    Choose Other and the Color Circle will appear,

    In the Color Spectrum bring it to the darkest option.

    It is not a perfect solution, nor one that I would expect from Microsoft, but this darkens the highlight to a point that you can actually work comfortably.

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