Create Custom Shading Colours in Word

The text highlighting tool in Word 2013 limits you to fifteen colours, but most of those are useless because they make the text hard to read. However, you can easily create custom highlighting colours that are more pleasing to the eye and offer more choices.

Note: When you pick a highlight or shading colour for a document that is likely to be printed, you should print the document to ensure that the highlighted text will be legible in the hard copy. In my experience, theme colours (in the first screenshot below) reproduce reasonably accurately, but many of the Standard and Custom colours (in the second and third screenshots) print darker than they appear on screen.

To use a custom highlight colour:

1. Select the text you want to highlight.
2. In the ribbon's Home tab, in the Paragraph group, click the arrow beside the Shading icon. A colour palette appears.
3. Do either of the following:

• From the Theme Colours palette, select a colour.

• Click More Colors. From the Colours dialog box that appears, select a Standard colour or define a Custom colour, then click OK.

Your selected shading colour is applied to the text you selected.

If you have a shade you're particularly fond of (pale purple, for example), you can use this technique to assign the colour to a character style. Then to apply the highlight, just select the character style from the styles list.