How to Highlight in Pages for Mac

Frequent Pages users may find it helpful to know how to highlight selections, words, sentences, and paragraphs of documents opened within the app. Highlighting is particularly useful for students, writers, editors, educators, and office workers, but it’s valuable to nearly anyone who spends a fair amount of time in the word processing application on a Mac. While the highlighting ability may not be completely obvious at first, highlighting in Pages is quite simple and is actually part of a built-in commenting feature that is easy to use and fast to implement throughout documents opened in Pages on Mac OS.

We’ll show you how to highlight in Pages app on the Mac by applying an initial selection highlight, and also demonstrate two different methods to adding additional highlights to other selections if desired.

Be sure you update Pages on Mac before attempting to do this, the earlier versions of the app do not support the highlight and commenting feature we will demonstrate here. You can update Pages from the  Apple menu and choosing “App Store” and then going to the Updates tab and finding Pages to update.

How to Highlight in Pages

1. Open a document within Pages for Mac



2. Using the cursor, select the word, sentence, paragraph, or section you would like to highlight in Pages



3. Now pull down the “Insert” menu and choose “Highlight”

The selected portion of the document will now be highlighted, with the default background highlight color being bright yellow much like a yellow highlight marker would be.

Adding Additional Highlights to Documents in Pages

Once you have added a single highlight, you can then quickly apply new highlights by using the comments and highlight bar that appears across the top of the document.

To use this, simply select some text or a section of the document in Pages, then click on the “Highlight” button in the bar.

Keyboard Shortcut for Highlighting in Pages for Mac

If you find yourself highlighting sections of documents often, you can speed up your highlighting in Pages by using a keystroke:

• Select the text to highlight, then hit Shift + Command + H on the keyboard to immediately highlight the selected section of the document

You can use any method you’d like to add new highlights to the document.

If you plan on highlighting multiple different documents in Pages, you will need to access the Highlight feature in any open document. Thus, whether you have multiple open documents in tabs within Pages or as separate windows, each document must be highlighted with the feature separately.

Removing a Highlight from Pages

You can easily remove a highlight as well by doing the following:

1. Click on the highlighted section of the document you wish to remove the highlight from
2. Click the “Delete” button in the little comment pop-up that appears
3. Repeat for additional highlights you want to delete

Note that deleting a highlight removes the highlight but does not delete the text that was highlighted.

It’s also important to point out that highlighting in Pages is separate from the general feature to select text in Mac OS and the ability to change the general highlight text selection color on Mac is entirely separate as well, with the latter being part of the Mac OS system and not specific to Pages app.

How to Highlight in Earlier Versions of Pages

Earlier versions of Pages app can apply manual highlighting of selections by changing the background color of selected portions of text. This is a bit more complex than the above easy highlighting feature in newer version of Pages, which is yet another reason why you should update the app to get the latest features.

1. Select your text, then go to the “Format” section and choose “Style”
2. Click the adjustments option (it looks like a gear) and then choose “Character Fill Color” and choose yellow, or your color of choice
3. Repeat for other selections you’d like to highlight

This approach is not necessary on modern version of Pages with newer features and the direct Highlight option.

Do you know of another way to highlight in Pages? Maybe there is a better way to highlight portions of a document in the app? Let us know in the comments below!