Changing the Selection Highlight Color in MS-Word

[britechguy]

Is there a way to do it?

I am aware of at least two registry hacks (this being one - https://learninghome.in/how-to-change-the-color-of-selected-text-in-microsoft-word/1564/) to change the selection highlight color from the default gray to black, which then makes the text white when selected.

But I have to believe there is a way to set the actual color to something other than black if that's wanted. I seem to recall that at one time this highlight color was light blue, and I have to believe that it could be made that, or any other RGB color, but I have no idea how.

If anyone does, would you please share?

 

[nlinecomputers]

Trial and error? Change the values to something other than what the tutorial says. If you break it you can just delete the key and start over.

 

[britechguy]

I'd go the trial and error route if the tutorial actually dealt with color. I've used this technique before, and it does make the "transparent" light gray go black, which is what I'd expect, but I have yet to see a key that actually dictates the color that would pair with the transparency on or off.

It's got to exist, but based on what I've found in the registry, I think that gray is a default that's hard coded unless something else were to be found. And it's interesting that you can still change the default selection color for pretty much all of the rest of Windows, but it does not carry over into Office (and probably M365) programs.

I definitely hate noodling with creating registry keys by guessing what they should be named then see if they work. But, there are times this would be very ill-advised, and others where it's unlikely to break anything, just not work.

I'm actually somewhat shocked that either this information is not out there on the web at all, or my "magic search term" skills have abandoned me for this particular search. All of the "color" stuff I've been able to find have dealt with transparency, not color. I may end up sticking with black selection, white text, for this client because I suspect it will work quite well, but for future clients, I'd like to have other options, if possible.

 

[Computer Bloke]

I definitely hate noodling with creating registry keys by guessing what they should be named

You can take some of the guesswork out of this process by extracting all the strings from the relevant binaries and then searching for the keys you already know. The odds are that if the key you want actually exists (not guaranteed, no matter how much you think it should) then it'll be somewhere nearby.

Fun for a dull afternoon.

 

[britechguy]

@Computer Bloke

Not that I wouldn't be willing to do that on a dull afternoon, but I will come out and say that I have zero, nada, zilch experience with doing so and have no idea how one would even go about it.

 

[Computer Bloke]

Strings - Sysinternals

Search for ANSI and UNICODE strings in binary images.

learn.microsoft.com

It's much easier than it sounds.

 

[britechguy]

It's much easier than it sounds.

Much appreciated.

 

[britechguy]

OK, now I have a complete mystery, but it's not a crisis.

I have the following in a REG file:
------------------
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
; Creates the NoTranslucentSelection subkey under Computer\HKCU\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Word\Options
; Since this key does not exist by default, and overwriting it were it to exist will not harm anything or change the outcome, error checking is absent

[HKCU\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Word\Options]
"NoTranslucentSelection"=dword:00000001
------------------

After running, and without a system restart if I open MS-Word 2016, the selection highlight is changed from translucent gray with black text to solid black with white text. So far, so good.

But here's the mystery: That key does not appear to be in the registry, anywhere, let alone where I set it. Even after a system restart, aand doing a search of the registry either on the whole key name or just "Translucent" finds nada.

I also can't seem to reverse this using the following command in a regedit file:

[HKCU\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Word\Options]
"NoTranslucentSelection"=-

Any insights as to what might be going on here would be appreciated. I have never had a registry key "go MIA" and yet still have the desired effect. Just plain weird.

As an aside, on the machine I'm actually typing from I long ago changed the Word selection color to solid black, but with the text being yellow, and I definitely did not use the above noted key, but I'll be darned if I know what I did and I have no notes that I can find, which is definitely in the "not like me" category.