No job is complete until the paperwork is done—and that
includes system documentation. Word’s highlighting feature can help you get
documentation changes out to your users quickly.

For example, let’s say you
just upgraded your network software and would like to distribute updated
manuals documenting those changes. Rather than having your users read through
the entire document, you can use Word’s highlighting feature to point out the
updated text. If you only have one block of text to highlight, you can select
the text, and then click the Highlight button in the Formatting toolbar. But,
if you are going to highlight more than one block of text at a time, it is
probably easier to first click the Highlight button, and then select the areas
you want to highlight one at a time, as you would with a highlighting pen. When
you are done, simply click the Highlight button to turn the function off.

If more than one person made changes to the document, you
may want each person to use a different color when highlighting changes. To
choose a new color, click on the Highlight button’s drop-down arrow and click
the desired color from the menu.

Your users do not have to scroll through the document to
find each highlighted area. Word’s Find feature can take them directly to the
highlighted areas. Follow these steps:

  1. Press
    [Ctrl]F.
  2. Click
    More.
  3. Click
    Format and select Highlight from the drop-down list.
  4. Click
    Find Next.

After you have found all instances of highlighted text,
click the No Formatting button to clear the search, and then click Cancel.

If you are using highlighting only to point out updated
text, you may not want the highlighting to appear in the finished document. You
can remove highlighting individually from each block of text by selecting the
block then clicking the Highlight button’s drop-down arrow and selecting None. A quicker way would be to use the Find and Replace
feature to remove all highlighted text at once. Follow these steps:

  1. Click the Highlight button arrow and select None from the menu.
  2. Press [Ctrl]H.
  3. Click More, if necessary.
  4. Click in the Find What box,
    select Format, and choose Highlight.
  5. Click in the Replace What box, select Format, and
    choose Highlight.
  6. Click Replace All and click OK.
  7. Click the No Formatting button to clear the search
    parameters, then click Close.

You can also follow these steps to change the document’s
highlight color from yellow to orange by selecting Orange in Step 1.

There may be times when you have to print out a highlighted
document, but you do not want the highlighted areas to show up in the printout.
You don’t have to remove the highlighting from your document altogether—just
follow these steps before printing:

  1. Go to Tools | Options.
  2. Under the View tab in the Show section, clear the
    Highlight check box.
  3. Click OK.

Once you print your document, you can turn highlighting back
on by going to Tools | Options and selecting the Highlight check box.

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