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
    2021-01-14T10:34:51+00:00

    Me too! Sooooo annoying!!!!!!!

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  2. Anonymous
    2021-01-05T08:03:13+00:00

    This the first answer that's actually helped me (and I've tried just about all of them on this thread).  THANK YOU!  I'm not crazy about the dingy gray background on all my documents, but it's better than not being able to see where I've highlighted.

    I have a 2017-vintage MacBook Pro 15 inch.  I was running Mac OS Mojave, but last weekend I did a clean install of OS Big Sur.  I re-installed Office (v.16.44--and I always install Office updates as soon as they're available, so I'm pretty sure that's what I was running before the clean install) and suddenly, I couldn't see where I'd highlighted text in my Word documents.  I didn't have this problem anywhere else--I could highlight text in Chrome, TextEdit, even Excel and see it just fine.  But in Word, I could barely make it out, and it took me about five minutes to get tired of putting my nose right up to the screen and tilting it this way and that to see what I'd selected.

    I've reported the problem to Microsoft, but given the number of people who've been doing that for months to no avail, I won't hold my breath until they fix this.

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  3. Anonymous
    2020-12-21T21:55:11+00:00

    Your solution did not work for me either. The highlighting in Word is still too light and much lighter than the system setting.

    I am now not having the problem but I am not sure what I did to solve it. I now have Big Sur ver 11.1. I am in dark mode. I have "increase contrast" checked under accessibility options and the highlight color selected is blue. If you all need any other details about my settings, let me know what you need and I will try to supply the info.

    Divingdoc1

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  4. Anonymous
    2020-12-20T11:06:46+00:00

    Your solution did not work for me either. The highlighting in Word is still too light and much lighter than the system setting.

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