Removing Only One Text Highlighting Color

Bas has a document where he uses yellow, green, and grey text highlights throughout. He wonders how he can remove only one color. He wants to remove all the green text highlighting but keep the yellow and grey.

Word allows you to highlight text using one of 16 colors, visible when you click the down-arrow next to the Text Highlight Color tool (on the Home tab of the ribbon). There is no way to use Find and Replace to find the individual highlighting colors—the Find and Replace tool treats all text highlighting the same.

You can access the individual colors through a macro, however. In doing so, you have to remember that Word allows you to get quite elaborate with your text highlighting—you can highlight down to the individual character. This means, for instance, that you could highlight each character in the word "highlighting" with a different color.

Why does this matter? Because I've seen macro-based solutions for this problem that use the Find and Replace tool (under, again, macro control) to search for highlighted text, then remove the highlight if it is a specific color. Here is a version of such a macro:

Sub RemoveOneHighlight()
    Dim HLColor As WdColorIndex
    Dim rg As Range

    HLColor = Selection.Range.HighlightColorIndex
    If HLColor <> wdNoHighlight Then
        Set rg = ActiveDocument.Range
        With rg.Find
            .Highlight = HLColor
            .Wrap = wdFindStop
            While .Execute
                If rg.HighlightColorIndex = HLColor Then
                    rg.HighlightColorIndex = wdNoHighlight
                End If
                rg.Collapse wdCollapseEnd
            Wend
        End With
    Else
        MsgBox "Place the cursor on text that has the highlight to remove."
    End If  
End Sub

This macro was written by Jay Freedman and can be found at the web page using this stupid-long URL:

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/how-to-get-word-to-automatically-remove-or-apply-a/04df106d-7372-4c5d-916e-c4c876d8344d

To use the macro, just position the insertion point inside a word that is highlighted using the color you want to remove. When you run it, it removes all the matching highlighting very quickly. There is a gotcha, though, and it is based in the way in which you can apply the highlighting.

Remember that you could highlight each character in the word "highlighting" with a different color. If you do so, then the macro just shown won't work on such a word. The reason is because the Find and Replace tool finds any block of text that uses any highlighting. Thus, the whole word "highlighting" would be considered a match and therefore be returned in the rg range. When the code checks to see if the HighlightColorIndex property matches the desired color (HLColor), it will never match because, in my testing, HighlightColorIndex will contain an absurd value such as 999999, which won't match a color that should be between 1 and 16.

So, you can use Jay's macro if your text never has differing colors butted up against one another. (As I said, it is very fast.) If you might have butted-up colors, though, then the macro must look at each individual character and evaluate whether it is highlighted. Then, if the highlight color is one you want to change, you must remove that color. The following macro will take all these factors into consideration:

Sub RemoveSingleHighlight()
    Dim sHLColors(16) As String
    Dim iHLColors(16) As Integer
    Dim c As Range
    Dim J As Integer
    Dim sTemp As String
    Dim iColWanted As Integer
    Dim iChanges As Integer
    Dim bFoundSome As Boolean

    sHLColors(1) = "Black"
    sHLColors(2) = "Blue"
    sHLColors(3) = "Turquoise"
    sHLColors(4) = "Bright Green"
    sHLColors(5) = "Pink"
    sHLColors(6) = "Red"
    sHLColors(7) = "Yellow"
    sHLColors(8) = "White"
    sHLColors(9) = "Dark Blue"
    sHLColors(10) = "Teal"
    sHLColors(11) = "Green"
    sHLColors(12) = "Violet"
    sHLColors(13) = "Dark Red"
    sHLColors(14) = "Dark Yellow"
    sHLColors(15) = "Dark Gray"
    sHLColors(16) = "Light Gray"

    For J = 1 To 16
        iHLColors(J) = 0
    Next J
    bFoundSome = False

    For Each c In Selection.Characters
        If c.HighlightColorIndex <> wdNoHighlight Then
            iHLColors(c.HighlightColorIndex) = 1
            bFoundSome = True
        End If
    Next c

    If bFoundSome Then
        sTemp = "The following highlighting colors are used "
        sTemp = sTemp & "in the selected text:" & vbNewLine & vbNewLine
        For J = 1 To 16
            If iHLColors(J) > 0 Then
                sTemp = sTemp & "     " & J & ": " & sHLColors(J) & vbNewLine
            End If
        Next J
        sTemp = sTemp & vbNewLine & "Please enter the color number "
        sTemp = sTemp & "for the color you want to remove:"

        iColWanted = Val(InputBox(sTemp))
        If (iColWanted < 1) Or (iColWanted > 16) Then iColWanted = 0

        iChanges = 0
        If iColWanted > 0 Then
            For Each c In Selection.Characters
                If c.HighlightColorIndex = iColWanted Then
                    c.HighlightColorIndex = wdNoHighlight
                    iChanges = iChanges + 1
                End If
            Next c

            sTemp = "There were " & iChanges & " characters using "
            sTemp = sTemp & "the " & sHLColors(iColWanted) & " color. "
            sTemp = sTemp & "These were all changed in the selected text."
        Else
            sTemp = "No changes made to the selected text."
        End If
    Else
        sTemp = "The selected text contained no highlighted text."
    End If
    MsgBox sTemp
End Sub

To use the macro, select the text you want to affect before running it. The first thing the macro does is to step through each character in selected text and determine what text highlighting colors are used. This information is then presented in an input box, where the user is invited to enter the color code of the color to be removed.

Assuming the user puts in a valid color code, then each character is again examined and, if the highlight of the character uses the specified color, then the color is removed. Finally, the macro displays a message box indicating how many characters were changed.

Because the macro steps through each character in the selected text (twice), it can take a while to run if the selection is quite large. For this reason, you may want to only run it on a reasonable amount, such as a page or two at a time.

This might lead you to wonder if there is a way to combine the speed of Jay's macro with the thoroughness of my macro. Well, there is, to a degree, as shown in this version of Jay's macro:

Sub RemoveOneSingleHighlight()
    Dim HLColor As WdColorIndex
    Dim rg As Range
    Dim c As Range

    HLColor = Selection.Range.HighlightColorIndex
    If HLColor <> wdNoHighlight Then
        Set rg = ActiveDocument.Range
        With rg.Find
            .Highlight = True
            .Wrap = wdFindStop
            While .Execute
                For Each c In rg.Characters
                    If c.HighlightColorIndex = HLColor Then
                        c.HighlightColorIndex = wdNoHighlight
                    End If
                Next c
                rg.Collapse wdCollapseEnd
            Wend
        End With
    Else
        MsgBox "Place the cursor on text that has the highlight to remove."  
    End If  
End Sub

The key to this version is that it doesn't check the HighlightColorIndex of the whole range (rg) returned by Find and Replace. Instead, it checks the highlight color of each individual character in the returned range and, if a color match is found, the highlight color is removed. It works just ever so slightly slower than Jay's original macro, but much faster than mine. It also does no reporting and seeks no feedback from the user—as long as you position the insertion point in a word highlighted using the desired color, it removes that color from all highlighting in the document.

There is one other change I made to Jay's original macro. He had originally set the .Highlight property of the .Find object to be equal to HLColor. This gives the mistaken impression that the .Highlight property can be set to a specific highlighting color, but it cannot. According to the Microsoft VBA docs, this property can only be set to True, False, or wdUndefined. It also explains why Find and Replace can only find highlighted text, not text using a specific highlighting color. So, I changed Jay's code so that it reflects the proper use of the .Highlight property.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (12879) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, Word in Microsoft 365, and 2021.