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
    2020-06-10T17:10:51+00:00

    Thanks. Tried that but didn't really help.

    However, doing so I noticed something interesting: When I move the window to the internal retina display of the macbook instead of my 27' screen connected to it, the light blue highlighting all of a sudden becomes much more visible, i.e. it's still not really good, but it's much better than on the external monitor.

    Do you guys experience that too?

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  2. Anonymous
    2020-06-10T15:45:03+00:00

    Try Shift+Command+3 for a whole window screenshot that way the lack of highlight for your message to Microsoft will show. I found when I highlight just a section for the screenshot the faint highlight was made visible in that process as you described.

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  3. Anonymous
    2020-06-10T15:40:41+00:00

    Thanks for the suggestion Jim to send the feedback directly to Microsoft. Done, and fingers crossed for a solution to this frustrating issue.

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  4. Anonymous
    2020-06-10T14:41:21+00:00

    Thank you for letting me know it STILL hasn't been fixed.  I was tempted to try a new upgrade but now will wait and stick with 16.29.

    Do you love the new 16" MacBook? I've had it for several months and like it very much, though I do have one key that seems to be sticking.

    CPG

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