Making Bookmarks Bold

If you have quite a few bookmarks in your documents, you may want to highlight them, perhaps by making them bold, so that you can see them better. Word provides a direct way to highlight bookmarks:

1. Display the Word Options dialog box. (In Word 2007 click the Office button and then click Word Options. In Word 2010 and later versions display the File tab of the ribbon and then click Options.)
2. Click Advanced at the left side of the dialog box.
3. Scroll down until you see the Show Document Content section. (See Figure 1.)



Figure 1. The Advanced options of the Word Options dialog box.

4. Make sure the Show Bookmarks check box is selected.
5. Click OK.

The result is that any bookmarks in the document are surrounded by [brackets]. These don't print, but only appear on-screen and are very helpful in visually locating the bookmarks.

If you actually want to make the bookmarks bold, one approach is to create a special character style to be used for bookmarks. You could set the style to be bold, and then apply it to all your bookmarked text.

You can also use a macro to make your bookmarks bold. The following macro will step through each bookmark in a document and make its text bold:

Sub BookMarks2Bold()
    Dim bm As Bookmark
    Dim tx As Range

    Set tx = ActiveDocument.StoryRanges(wdMainTextStory)
    For Each bm In tx.Bookmarks
        bm.Range.Bold = True
    Next
End Sub

If you later want to turn off the bold attribute for bookmarks, you can do so by changing True to False in the line that actually does the property assignment.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (10730) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and Word in Microsoft 365. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Word here: Making Bookmarks Bold.