Printing in White

Word allows you to easily specify the color to use for different fonts in your document. You can even format text using a color of white. This effectively makes the text "disappear" because seeing white text on white paper is about as easy as seeing a white snowflake in a field of snow.

If you try to print text that is formatted as white, it won't print—Word effectively ignores it. Why? Because most printers (even color printers) use one, two, or four colors. None of these colors available in the printer, of course, is white—so it can't be printed. (In other words, you can't print using ink that you don't have.)

The answer, of course, is to get a special printer or ink cartridge that allows you to print using white ink. In that case, you still wouldn't format your text in Word using white. Instead, black text would actually print out as white, since you effectively replaced the black ink in the printer with the white ink cartridge.

Sound confusing? It can be. But it all boils down to the fact that formatting text as white has no effect on a printout, and you can't print in white unless your printer physically supports the use of white ink.

There is one other option you can try. You can select a paragraph, change the font color to white, and then—with the paragraph still selected—change the background color to something other than white. You can change the background color by displaying the Home tab of the ribbon and using the Shading tool in the Paragraph group. The on-screen result is that you end up with white text on a black background. This will print just fine, but understand that you aren't really "printing in white." What you are doing is printing in black (the background) and leaving the text "unprinted" so that the paper color (white) shows through.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (10098) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, 2021, 2024, and Word in Microsoft 365. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Word here: Printing in White.