{"id":7519,"date":"2015-06-17T00:01:29","date_gmt":"2015-06-17T07:01:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=7519"},"modified":"2015-06-13T11:07:35","modified_gmt":"2015-06-13T18:07:35","slug":"highlighter-v-background-color","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/?p=7519","title":{"rendered":"Highlighter v. Background Color"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>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&#8217;s post concerns a question I&#8217;ve pondered before: Why does Word feature a Highlighter command?<br \/>\n<!--more--><br \/>\nI&#8217;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?<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_7521\" style=\"width: 510px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-7521\" src=\"http:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/0617-fig1.png\" alt=\"Figure 1. Location of the Text Highlight Color and Shading command buttons.\" width=\"500\" height=\"151\" class=\"size-full wp-image-7521\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/0617-fig1.png 500w, https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/0617-fig1-300x91.png 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-7521\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Figure 1. Location of the Text Highlight Color and Shading command buttons.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>Visually, both commands do the same thing with regards to the visual effect on text, as shown in Figure 2.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_7522\" style=\"width: 438px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-7522\" src=\"http:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/0617-fig2.png\" alt=\"Figure 2. Highlight and Shading effects on text look identical.\" width=\"428\" height=\"37\" class=\"size-full wp-image-7522\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/0617-fig2.png 428w, https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/06\/0617-fig2-300x26.png 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 428px) 100vw, 428px\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-7522\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Figure 2. Highlight and Shading effects on text look identical.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>This similarity and overlap makes me question why Microsoft added the Highlighter tool to Word.<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;t the point.<\/p>\n<p>To the Shading command&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;s more of a document-markup feature and a text background color. Click the Highlight command again or press Esc to exit highlighting mode.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;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&#8217;s easier for me to see when I&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;d see green. Alas, it just doesn&#8217;t work that way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It baffles me why Word has such similar commands.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[9],"class_list":["post-7519","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main","tag-word"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7519","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7519"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7519\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7528,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7519\/revisions\/7528"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7519"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7519"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7519"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}