Word: Highlight remains even after I’ve cleared it

Colette, a colleague of mine, had a problem with her Word 2007 document. She had highlighted some section headings for areas that she needed to finish, and those highlights showed up nicely in the Table of Contents (TOC) as a visual reminder.
Once she’d finished those sections, she removed the highlighting by selecting the highlighted text and pressing Delete.

However, the outline numbered heading was still highlighted: 

She then updated the TOC. But that heading ‘number’ (the Appendix number) remained highlighted in the TOC. She wanted to know why it was still there and how to fix it.

You will see this behavior with any numbered or bulleted list when you haven’t selected the paragraph mark at the time you cleared the highlighting. If you don’t have your paragraph marks showing, you have to select the entire paragraph (heading, list bullet, list number) and remove the highlighting.

If you do have your paragraph marks showing (and I recommend that you always have them turned on), then you can just select the paragraph mark (as shown below) and apply the ‘No Color’ highlighting. Even though the paragraph mark itself isn’t highlighted, that mark stores the highlighting inside it and this is what causes the auto number/bullet to remain highlighted.

Once you select the paragraph mark and clear the highlighting, it disappears from the auto number/bullet:

Now, update the TOC. Because my client’s template uses several ‘update field’ macros, sometimes right-clicking and selecting Update Field or pressing F9 just doesn’t update the TOC in our documents correctly, so I always show my colleagues this method as it always seems to work: Go to the References tab, then click Update Table in the Table of Contents group.

Make sure you select Update entire table, when asked:

And the highlighting will be gone!

[Links last checked May 2011]