Table shading in Word leaves text with unwanted white background

Question

I am using Word 2016 on Windows 10. I cannot get rid of the white background for text when I apply shading to specific table cells, as you can see below:

The shading is applied to the cell, but choosing any other value (text, paragraph, table) also results in the same behavior.

I am a seasoned Word user and this never used to happen before.

Solution 1

OK, I think I've got this sorted. The text in my cells uses the Normal style and had exactly the problem shown in the question - a white highlight against the cell shading colour. I fiddled with modifying the Style's Borders & Shading - but the Fill was No colour and the pattern was Clear, so all looked OK.

SOLUTION:

1. Triple-clicked to select the text in a cell
2. Right-click and choose Borders and Shading
3. Select Shading tab and set Fill to No Colour
4. Select Apply to: Text and click OK (this is the key step!)
5. Right click on Style in Styles panel and Update to match selection

Disadvantage: Any Bold, Italic, etc applied to existing text will be cleared and will need to be re-applied.

Solution 2

I have found that when the No Color options do not work, I choose the Clear Formatting icon in the Font section (AB Eraser icon). It removes the color and the formatting, but the formatting is much easier to fix!

Solution 3

Highlight the text - right click - go to border and shading - apply to text - chose colour - if you don't highlight the text the text option won't come up. then you can change text background colour - then go borders and shading and chose cell - then you can chose same colour from there - took me two hours of googling and trial and error before I luckily hit the right options

Solution 4

For me, if I clicked "apply to text" then it only changed the actual text background but still left white space everywhere else within the cell.

So I had to go to "apply to paragraph" to get it to apply to the entire cell. If I did "apply to cell" it didn't matter.

Also, I had to select each cell individually in order for this to work. If I selected an entire row and tried to apply to paragraph, it did nothing.

Solution 5

My solution was to import styles from another document. The style used by the table had been deleted, causing my problem.

View more solutions

Comments

[DavidPostill]

Format the text background to match the shading colour.

[Penanghill]

Thanks, this was very helpful!

[Alisa]

Great! I checked some of the other solutions with no success. But this one worked. Thanks.