Changing the Underline Color

When Charles underlines words or uses an underline as a leader for tab stops, the underline is in black. He wonders if there is a way to make the underline in a different color, such as gray.

When I want to underline text, I typically just select that text and press Ctrl+U. I suspect that is what Charles is doing, as well, because doing so makes it easy to miss how you can underline the text and format the underline.

Notice on the Home tab of the ribbon there is an Underline tool, in the Font group. (It looks like an underlined U.) To the right side of this tool there is a down-arrow. If you click this after selecting the text you want to affect, you can choose a style for your underline. Notice, as well, that at the bottom of the options there is an Underline Color option. Click this, and you can choose the color for the underline.

If you cannot see an Underline Color option (perhaps you are using Word on a Mac), then you'll need to display the Font dialog box after selecting your text. (To display the Font dialog box, just press Ctrl+D on the PC or Cmd+D on the Mac.) (See Figure 1.)

Figure 1. The Font dialog box.

In the middle of the dialog box are two drop-down lists, one for Underline Style and the other for Underline Color.

Charles also asked about setting the color of the underline when it is a tab stop leader. When setting the tab stop, Word doesn't allow you to specify a color in the Tabs dialog box. However, once the tab stop is set, with the leader, you can select the actual tab character in your document and format it to be any color you want. This concept is covered more fully in this tip:

https://wordribbon.tips.net/T5135

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (12720) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and Word in Microsoft 365.