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
    2020-08-22T17:43:31+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

    Hi Elaine,

    I called Microsoft tech support and was told that they do not monitor this customer forum 🤔and the only way to get their attention is to click on the help icon of person with a speech bubble in the top right corner of a Word doc and send your comments EVERY time you have this issue.

    Apparently when they get "enough" feedback on a specific issue they will fix it.  Lets give them lots of feedback and hope this gets fixed!

    Kate

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  2. Anonymous
    2020-08-03T15:50:50+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?

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  3. Anonymous
    2020-07-31T15:29:38+00:00

    I am having same issues. Any solutions?

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  4. Anonymous
    2020-06-10T18:21:14+00:00

    I am using only the retina display on both my 16" MacBook and my smaller MacBook Air, and both show the faint highlighting with the updated software.

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