Please Note: This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Word versions: 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and 2021. If you are using an earlier version (Word 2003 or earlier), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for earlier versions of Word, click here: Changing Existing Highlighting.

Changing Existing Highlighting

Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated October 23, 2021)
This tip applies to Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and 2021

Do you have a document that has lots of highlighting already applied in it? Do you want to change all that highlighting from the current color to a different color? If you answered yes to these questions, you can use the find and replace capabilities of Word to achieve the desired results. Follow these steps:

Use the Highlight tool to specify the color you want as the "after" color; the one you want to change to. (Click the drop-down arrow at the right of the Highlight tool and select the color you want.)
Press Ctrl+H to display the Replace tab of the Find and Replace dialog box. (See Figure 1.)

Figure 1. The Replace tab of the Find and Replace dialog box.

With the insertion point in the Find What box, click Format | Highlight. (You may need to click the More button to see the Format button.)
With the insertion point in the Replace With box, again click Format | Highlight.
Click Replace All.

All of the highlighting in the document should change to whatever color you selected in step 1.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (9504) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and 2021. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Word here: Changing Existing Highlighting.

Author Bio

Allen Wyatt

With more than 50 non-fiction books and numerous magazine articles to his credit, Allen Wyatt is an internationally recognized author. He is president of Sharon Parq Associates, a computer and publishing services company. Learn more about Allen...

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What is two minus 1?

2021-10-23 08:37:30

Tomek

Is there a way to be selective about this color swap? It seems that the search for highlight is color blind and will replace all highlights with a new color. What if there are some words highlighted in blue and some in pink, but I want to change only pink ones to yellow?

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