It does matter in two circumstances.

The more usual reason to choose shading is that highlighting (the one on the
toolbar) allows only 15 different colors, of which about half are too dark
to let you read the highlighted text unless you also change the text color
to something that contrasts with it. Shading gives you the entire gamut of
RGB colors to choose from when none of the highlighting colors will do, or
when you need more than the handful that are usable. If you do this often,
it's worth creating a macro to make shading as easy to apply as using the
highlighting button.

The other difference occurs when you're using a macro to manipulate the
document. You need completely different code to handle shading than to
handle highlighting.

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP FAQ: http://word.mvps.org
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.

Tony Jollans wrote:
For most practical purposes the differences don't really matter, but
the two are different.


"Curious" wrote in message
...
I would like to know if the hihlight button on the formatting toolar
is a shortcut to selecting a fill colour within the shading tab of
the Borders and Shading dialog box.