Okay, this can be done. Apply blue shading to your paragraph or table cell,
then white (Clear) shading to your text. When you apply blue shading to the
paragraph/cell, the Automatic font color switches to white, so you'll have
to select the text and format it explicitly as black. You cannot control the
amount of white around the text, but you can control how much blue there is
if you also apply a blue border and use the Border Options to increase the
distance from text.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
Word MVP FAQ site: http://word.mvps.org
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.

"Ahoyhoy" wrote in message
...
"Ahoyhoy" wrote in message
...
Is it possible to highlight text in white, so that a piece of black
text
on
a blue background is highlighted with white. White is not one of the
options
on my version of Word (2002).

Thanks.




"Tony Jollans" My Forename at My Surname dot com wrote in message
...
What matters is whether your printer can print in white. Most printers
just
don't print anything as they assume the paper is white.

--
Enjoy,
Tony




I know that printers don't actually print white. What I want is for the
blue
background to have white space in which the text sits, and I had hoped
that
highlighting in white would be the easiest way to achieve this.

I realise the reason that Microsoft don't include white as a highlighting
option as most printing is done on white paper, but with the huge increase
in colour printing where you might have a text box, say, with a coloured
background containing black text, the option to then highlight part of
that
text in white would be extremely useful. It's about time Microsoft
provided
this option.