Adding a Little Color

Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated May 14, 2020)
This tip applies to Word 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003

There may be times when you want your text to appear in different colors. This is particularly helpful for emphasis or for use with a color printer. A very easy way to do this is to use the Font Color tool on the toolbar. If you want, you can make the process even easier by creating your own tool that assigns a single specific color to text. To do this, follow these steps:

Choose Customize from the Tools menu. Word displays the Customize dialog box.
Click on the Commands tab.
Select the All Commands option in the list of Categories. This displays all the Word commands available. (See Figure 1.)

Figure 1. The Commands tab of the Customize dialog box.

In the Commands list, choose Color. A Color drop-down list appears near the bottom of the dialog box.
Choose the color you want to use from the Color drop-down list.
In Step 4 you selected the Color option from the Commands list. Click on that option again and drag it to a toolbar (for instance, to the right of the Underline tool on the Formatting toolbar). When you release the mouse button, the new tool appears on the toolbar.
Click on Close to close the Toolbars dialog box.

Now you can select any text desired and then click on the new toolbar button to assign the color to the text.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (258) applies to Microsoft Word 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003.

Author Bio

Allen Wyatt

With more than 50 non-fiction books and numerous magazine articles to his credit, Allen Wyatt is an internationally recognized author. He is president of Sharon Parq Associates, a computer and publishing services company. Learn more about Allen...

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What is nine minus 5?

2015-07-28 12:47:28

Joanne

How do I do this in Word 2010???

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