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

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.

0 comments
Answer accepted by question author
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.

Was this answer helpful?

30+ people found this answer helpful.
0 comments

62 additional answers

Sort by: Oldest
Most helpful Newest Oldest
  1. Anonymous
    2020-06-03T16:54:03+00:00

    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.

    Was this answer helpful?

    5 people found this answer helpful.
    0 comments
  2. 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.

    Was this answer helpful?

    1 person found this answer helpful.
    0 comments
  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.

    Was this answer helpful?

    1 person found this answer helpful.
    0 comments
  4. Anonymous
    2020-06-08T15:38:01+00:00

    I have the same problem. When I select text on Word (Version 16.37/Office365 subscription) on MacOS Catalina 10.15.5 I cannot see what is selected at all, i.e. the background remains white where it should be light blue. 

    Interestingly, when I tried to make a screenshot to explain the problem here (using the "Skitch" tool) then in the screenshot text I selected is highlighted correctly (with light blue) whereas on the screen it's still white.

    Tried to change the "hilight" color in the Control Panel preferences, doesn't change. Night mode doesn't help neither. Changing monitor color profile also did have no effect.

    The problem does not appear in non Microsoft office applications, it doesn't appear in Microsoft Edge, but it also appears in Outlook.

    Was this answer helpful?

    0 comments