Adding a Little Color

by Allen Wyatt
(last updated March 21, 2015)

1

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:

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

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

  4. In the Commands list, choose Color. A Color drop-down list appears near the bottom of the dialog box.
  5. Choose the color you want to use from the Color drop-down list.
  6. 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.
  7. 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. ...

MORE FROM ALLEN

Moving the Insertion Point to the End of a Line

When writing a macro to process the text in a document, you may need to move the insertion point to the end of a line. This ...

Discover More

Hash Marks Displayed Instead of Cell Contents

Have you ever entered information in a cell only for it to appear as hash marks? This tip explains why this happens, how you ...

Discover More

Requiring Input

If you distribute a workbook that is used by others for data entry, you may want a way to make sure they fill in certain ...

Discover More

Do More in Less Time! Are you ready to harness the full power of Word 2013 to create professional documents? In this comprehensive guide you'll learn the skills and techniques for efficiently building the documents you need for your professional and your personal life. Check out Word 2013 In Depth today!

More WordTips (menu)

Replacing Quoted Text with Italics

If you have text surrounded by quotes in a document, you may want to remove the quote marks and make the text that was within ...

Discover More

Underlining Quoted Text

Do you have a document in which you need to convert all the quoted text (text surrounded by quotes) to underlined text? If ...

Discover More

Creating Custom Underlines

Word provides a wide assortment of underlines that you can apply to your text. If the assortment isn't wide enough for your ...

Discover More
Subscribe

FREE SERVICE: Get tips like this every week in WordTips, a free productivity newsletter. Enter your address and click "Subscribe."

View most recent newsletter.

(Your e-mail address is not shared with anyone, ever.)

Comments

If you would like to add an image to your comment (not an avatar, but an image to help in making the point of your comment), include the characters [{fig}] in your comment text. You’ll be prompted to upload your image when you submit the comment. Images larger than 600px wide or 1000px tall will be reduced. Up to three images may be included in a comment. All images are subject to review. Commenting privileges may be curtailed if inappropriate images are posted.

What is 3 + 4?

2015-07-28 12:47:28

Joanne

How do I do this in Word 2010???

This Site

Got a version of Word that uses the menu interface (Word 97, Word 2000, Word 2002, or Word 2003)? This site is for you! If you use a later version of Word, visit our WordTips site focusing on the ribbon interface.

Newest Tips
Subscribe

FREE SERVICE: Get tips like this every week in WordTips, a free productivity newsletter. Enter your address and click "Subscribe."

(Your e-mail address is not shared with anyone, ever.)

View the most recent newsletter.

Links and Sharing
OUR COMPANY
OUR PRODUCTS
OUR AUTHORS
OUR SITES
 

Copyright © 2017 Sharon Parq Associates, Inc.