Microsoft Word for Mac: text highlighting too "light"

Anonymous

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.

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Anonymous

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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62 additional answers

Anonymous

2020-12-19T22:11:56+00:00

It is December 18, 2020 and I have the most up-to-date version of Microsoft Word / Office Suite Version 16.43

Apparently all the people complaining about the too-light highlighting colour have not been acknowledged. Because this problem persists. Seems to have become a problem for me with the latest updates!!

I tried every position on the color wheel -- yet the highlighting persists in being so faint it's hard to tell whether I've selected what I wanted to select. This is VERY annoying and makes doing detailed cut & paste work nearly impossible.

Has anyone got any updates on how to fix -- or even, why this has been adjusted to be so user-unfriendly?

I also had this problem. Please check my answer that worked for me. I'm not the originator of the solution, but it has worked.

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/microsoft-word-for-mac-text-highlighting-too-light/109ba621-4598-4c11-b367-8d02aa7864ca?page=5
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Anonymous

2020-12-19T00:47:28+00:00

It is December 18, 2020 and I have the most up-to-date version of Microsoft Word / Office Suite Version 16.43

Apparently all the people complaining about the too-light highlighting colour have not been acknowledged. Because this problem persists. Seems to have become a problem for me with the latest updates!!

I tried every position on the color wheel -- yet the highlighting persists in being so faint it's hard to tell whether I've selected what I wanted to select. This is VERY annoying and makes doing detailed cut & paste work nearly impossible.

Has anyone got any updates on how to fix -- or even, why this has been adjusted to be so user-unfriendly?
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Anonymous

2020-11-24T20:20:48+00:00

My slider was slightly off of left, but putting it all the way to the left did not make the Word highlight as dark as it is other places. It seems to be a bug with the latest version Word 2019/Microsoft 365
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Anonymous

2020-11-18T16:30:24+00:00

In my case the System Preferences trick did work (thanks!), but with some modifications.

When I checked my SysPrefs settings, the Display contrast was already set to Normal (all the way left) and highlighting was near invisible in Word. Moving the slider all the way right and back left again made the highlight more visible but as others have noticed it is still not quite as visible as Powerpoint.
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