June 17, 2015

Highlighter v. Background Color

Filed under: Main — Tags: — admin @ 12:01 am

It must be Word Week here at Wambooli, because this is the second Microsoft Word post in a row. (And, yes, a third one is coming Friday.) Today’s post concerns a question I’ve pondered before: Why does Word feature a Highlighter command?

I’m not sure when the Highlighter command first appeared. Until then, Word featured a command to set the text background color. So why two commands?

Figure 1 illustrates both command locations. In one sense, highlighting is a text command and background color (shading) is a paragraph command, as shown by the groups where the commands are located.

Figure 1. Location of the Text Highlight Color and Shading command buttons.

Figure 1. Location of the Text Highlight Color and Shading command buttons.

Visually, both commands do the same thing with regards to the visual effect on text, as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2. Highlight and Shading effects on text look identical.

Figure 2. Highlight and Shading effects on text look identical.

This similarity and overlap makes me question why Microsoft added the Highlighter tool to Word.

In the old days, new commands appeared because of Feature Wars: Competing word processing software would offer some new feature and, obviously, Microsoft had to shove that tool into Word to remain competitive. Whether the tool was useful or necessary wasn’t the point.

To the Shading command’s credit, more colors and styles are available for shading than are available to the Highlighter tool. Further, the Shading command applies to other items in a document, such as cells in a table. Also, Shading offers more colors than the Highlighter tool.

The Highlighting tool, however, can be toggled: Click once to highlight a single item. Click the button twice and the mouse pointer changes to the Highlighting tool: Any text you drag over is highlighted. That’s more of a document-markup feature and a text background color. Click the Highlight command again or press Esc to exit highlighting mode.

I’ve found more quirks and oddities with text highlighting than with the Shading tool, but I do use it often: I highlight text in my document that needs attention later. It’s easier for me to see when I’m madly scrolling about. Of course, background color would be just as easy to see, so any excuse I have for one mode versus the other is moot.

Oh, and both commands do compete with each other. I was hoping that if I highlighted in yellow text with a blue background that I’d see green. Alas, it just doesn’t work that way.

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