Removing Shading from Many Paragraphs

Just use Format painting, way less hassle.

Someone used Shading instead of the Highlight button to "highlight" text throughout a 200+ page Word document. I tried selecting the whole document, clicking the Shading button on the Home tab, and then selecting No Color, but that did nothing (Word 2016). The above macro also did not work. However, the following macro did the trick:

Sub Macro()
Selection.Font.Shading.Texture = wdTextureNone
Selection.Shading.BackgroundPatternColor = wdColorWhite
Selection.Shading.ForegroundPatternColor = wdColorWhite
End Sub

This doesn't work for me. Selecting the entire document then using the character shading tool in the Paragraph group of the Home tab does nothing at all in Word 16.

Thanks very much to Ken Endacott for the information and especially the macro!

After I wrestled with Word for an hour to remove shading from the document, including following the instructions on this page without success, I ran Ken Endacott's macro. It went paragraph by paragraph through my whole document removing the shading while leaving the highlighting intact, while I watched! It was incredibly satisfying to watch it zap all of the shading paragraph by paragraph. I wouldn't speed it up even if I could. LOL

The methods given will only remove shading where it is applied to whole paragraphs. Shading can be paragraph or character. Character shading can be removed by selecting the shaded text and clicking CTRL + SPACE. However this also removes other character formatting such as bold, underline or italic.

If the shading is applied to scattered text in a large document then there are two choices, the first is to select each paragraph that has some shaded test and apply No Color from the shading menu, just as long as you don’t include the paragraph mark in the selection. A somewhat tedious exercise.

The second method is to use a macro. The following macro will remove both paragraph and character shading from a document without affecting other formatting.

Sub removeShading3()
Dim aRange As Range
Dim aPara As Paragraph
Dim k As Long

For Each aPara In ActiveDocument.Paragraphs
aPara.Range.Select
Selection.Shading.BackgroundPatternColor = wdColorAutomatic
k = aPara.Range.Characters.Count
Set aRange = aPara.Range
If k > 1 Then aRange.MoveEnd unit:=wdCharacter, Count:=-1
DoEvents
aRange.Shading.Texture = wdTextureNone
aRange.Shading.ForegroundPatternColor = wdColorAutomatic
aRange.Shading.BackgroundPatternColor = wdColorAutomatic

Next aPara
MsgBox "Finished removing shading"
End Sub

Dr H: See the WordTips FAQ if you need to know what the ribbon is:

http://wordribbon.tips.net/faq.html

-Allen

WTF is the "Home tab of the ribbon"?

I don't see anything called a "ribbon", nor any "home tabs".

Don't understand why a macro should be necessary to turn off a simple text format like shading. Never had this problem with WordPerfect.

Ctrl + y does the same thing as F4.