TechRepublic’s Microsoft Office Suite newsletter, delivered every Wednesday, is designed to help your users get the most from Word, Excel, and Access. Even if you’re the only one using the system, this change impacts almost every application, so be prepared for a bit of adjustment. In Mozilla SeaMonkey Mail 1.x, this is used for the selected email message in the Header Pane. The customer said there was not enough contrast between the two and asked for it to be more like it was in Windows 7.

If other people use your system, this change might not be a good idea. The default in Windows 10 is a lighter shade of blue for the highlight (aka text selection background) and white for the selected text. Click Window Color (at the bottom of the screen).Right-click the Desktop and choose Personalize.The process is a little different in Windows 7: From the Color 1 dropdown, choose the color you want to use with selected items (cells, text, email, and so on).From the Item dropdown, choose Selected Items.Right-click the Desktop and choose Properties from the resulting context menu.If you can live with that, do the following to change the selection color in your Office applications and everything else, in Windows XP: Office doesn’t control the color, Windows does and it doesn’t take long to change the default. Just keep in mind that the change is system-wide and not just a subtle change to Office. When you select cells in Excel, text in Word, and even e-mail in Outlook, your system displays the selected data in a contrasting color-the default is gray. I mean the 'Advanced' find feature via CTRL+H, or via the Ribbon: Home > Editing > Find > Advanced Find.Ĭhanging the 'Office Theme' did not seem to make a difference for the selection coloring.Īlso, the selected text color in Notepad (which I take to indicate how Windows' colors are configured) does not match Office, but various Office apps all match eachother, so it must be some independent set of color configurations.Change the color of selected items in Microsoft OfficeĪ Windows setting determines the contrasting color of selected items in your Office applications. In regards to 'Find and replace', I am not referring to the annotation/formatting highlighter feature at all, and not the search produced by CTRL-F, (which starts a separate 'Navigation' side bar with search capability which only partially duplicates Find and Replace features and has a totally different highlighting color!). For me it might be worse because of less red signal in the white for less overall contrast. I can see from other complaints that blue text is painful to read for many people. I am protoanomalous (one of the two common forms of red-green color weakness). How can a user change the highlight background color for selected text in Microsoft Office (version Office 365 (16.0), if it matters)? This selection color appears also to apply to matched words from the 'Find and replace' dialog. The blue text on white background is dreadful.

Selected text color windows 10