Change the font colour

Font colour

By default your text will be black. You can change this here:

1. Click and drag your mouse to select some text.
2. Click on the arrow next to the colour selector:

   

3. Choose the colour you want by clicking on it.
4. To change it back to black, follow the same steps above but choose “Automatic”. This will change the colour back to black.

Practice point: Select some text and change it to red. Then, change it back to black.

Black is the usual colour for text in a Word document – for good reasons, as it’s usually the easiest to read. But, for practice, let’s go a bit crazy!

Practice point: Try to recreate this image:

(The colours in this image are: red, blue, orange and purple.)

Then, change the whole sentence back to black.

Highlight text

Instead of changing the colour of the text itself, you could also choose to highlight the text, like this:

To do this we’ll follow similar steps to changing the colour of the text:

1. Click and drag your mouse to select some text
2. Click on the arrow next to the highlight colour selector:

   

3. Choose the colour you want by clicking on it.
4. To remove highlights, select the highlighted text and click on the highlight colour selector (the button rather than the arrow)
   

Practice point: Try to recreate this image

Then, remove the highlight so the text looks like it did before.

Pro tips for selecting text: In this lesson we had to select text a few times. We’ll have to do that in future lessons too. Here are some approaches other than clicking and dragging with the mouse:

1. If you just need to select a single word, you can double-click on the word to select it.
2. If you want to select an entire line of text you can click to the left of the margin of the page, and it will select that entire line.
3. If you prefer to use the keyboard, you can press Ctrl and arrow keys to select text. Or, Ctrl Shift and arrow keys to select whole words at a time.

The video below demonstrates using these three pro tips: