Trouble Removing Highlight from Bullet Points and Numbered Lists [closed]

Question

I edited a document from a client with some highlights then later decided to remove the highlights for comments instead.

For whatever reason, the document highlighted a number of bullet point and numbered list sections which I could not revert when I attempted to select the entire document and change the highlighting to 'No Fill'.

The highlighted bullet point/number lists did not allow me to select them to revert.

Searches on Google seemed to result in a ton of convoluted "[Solved]" responses on their forum which didn't fix the issue for me (or resulted in a TLDR response from my brain...):

• Google Search: open office remove highlight bullet lists
  • [Solved] Yellow highlighting won't go away
  • [Solved] Bullet highlighting will not go away.
  • [Solved] Surprise Yellow Highlighting on Bullets & Numbers
  • Permanently highlighted bullets.
  • [Solved] Oddities Involving Bullets/Outlines & Font Styles
  • [Solved] Bullet color

Seriously... what the heck!? How can this be so hard? So I decided this issue needed some serious StackOverflow help...

Version info:

Apache OpenOffice-4.1.4 AOO414m5(Build:9788) - Rev. 1811857 2017-10-11 20:12

Silky

Answer 1

So after all that...

I figured it out. But its still crazy how it's not answered very clearly in the resources above... I hope this helps someone not spend as much time on this in the future.

If you double-click the first bullet/number of the list... it appears to select the first word of the first item of the list, BUT you'll see that it also selects the list bullets/numbers with a dark gray highlight.

Now selected, you can remove the highlight from the list.

Selecting all of the document doesn't select the numbered/bulleted lists.

Silky

Thanks for the solution! – Kimbro

this problem drove me crazy! yours is the only working solution! – Fetish

Answer 2

Well, most of this solutions didnt helped me. But I found a simple way to fix it:

1. Select Highlight option.
2. Position to the left of the bullet until the cursor converts to a white arrow.
3. One click to highlight entire text line. One click again to un-highlight the entire text line (including the bullet).

Adenosine

Answer 3

Select the highlighted area, rather "highlight" the highlighted area and press CTRL+Q, it is a paragraph formatting issue and this should remove all formatting from the selected area.

Angular

Answer 4

The answers above didn't work. Try this (mouse-select means left-click and drag the selection of words, aka highlighting but wanted to avoid confusion):

1. Turn on paragraph marks ¶ in Word
2. Add a clean paragraph before the highlighted-bullet sentence. (Clean means it's unbulleted, without colour highlight, unformatted)
3. Mouse-select the entire bulleted sentence containing the highlighted bullet. Make sure the selection also goes left before the highlighted bullet to include the clean paragraph above it i.e. your selection should include the ''¶'' mark of the clean paragraph you created in 2.
4. Apply white/clear/no-colour highlighting.

Bloomers

Answer 5

(If you can) Start from above, add in a new clean bullet point, copy/paste the desired text from the problematic highlighted bullet point, then delete the problematic highlighted bullet point altogether.

Sondrasone

Answer 6

It's actually pretty simple though I was having trouble with it myself. Just select all the items of that particular bulleted/numbered list and highlight them. Then select the items again and remove the highlight. Doing that removed the highlights from the bullets too for me.

Perception

Answer 7

Super frustrating but here's the fix that's always worked for me (even with .doc or .docx file):

1. Double click the bulleted/numbered list item so they all highlight
2. Ctrl + Spacebar (resets character formatting)
3. Apply any needed formatting (font type, bold, etc.)

This will keep the formatting on the paragraph (indents, header type, etc.) but will just allow you to change the format of the actual text that is highlighted - which is likely all you want.

Hope that works for you!

Vixen

Answer 8

The highlighted text in the paragraph that you have highlighted past the period id causing this issue. If you want to keep the last sentence highlighted but remove the highlight bullet just remove highlight on the period at the end of the paragraph and the highlighted bullet goes away :)

Prospect

Answer 9

The previous solutions did not work for me. I have a large 100p document that is just one long set of indented numbered lists that serves as a technical specification. I had one single heading number that was highlighted and could not remove with the above descriptions. I went to the navigation sidebar and right clicked the suspect item and selected the context menu item "Select Heading and Content" I was then able to select the "No Color" option in the Ribbon.

Iatry