[Solved] Bullet highlighting will not go away.

[RoryCV]

I have been having this issue with my resume for a while now. The bullets have this green highlight that I can not get rid of. Every time I try some new way to remove them when I save the document and open it back up they come back. I have taken away the bullet format and put it back, changed the bullet style. The only thing that seems to work is when I save it as an .odt, but I can not really send that out to people since not everyone uses open office. When I save it back to a .doc the highlights come back.

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated, just as of now the only fix I can think of is to just redo the whole thing from scratch.

[John_Ha]

I don't know why it works, but I highlighted the bulleted text in the first set of bullets and went Format > Bullets and Numbering > Options. I set Character Style to Default Paragraph Font and this got rid of the green background. It could be an incompatibility with something in a .doc file (Character Style = WW8Num2z0??) which is not handled by Writer.

Another simple way to fix problem like this is to highlight all the text and remove all formatting by Clear formatting (a choice in the Styles box). Now reformat the text from scratch as you want it.

If this solves the problem, please edit your original post title to [Solved].

[RoryCV]

I have done that as well and yes it works. However once you save and reopen the file the highlighting returns.

[John_Ha]

Oops - I never checked to save/re-open it.

It is the Style of the bullet causing the problem. Highlight the bulleted text > Format > Bullets and Numbering > Options. Click Help (the AOO context related Help is very good!). See Character Styles - click the Character Style link for more information.

To fix it, open the Styles and Formatting window (press F11), click the Character Styles icon, right-click WW8Num2z0 to select it > Modify > Background. Remove the Green.

I think it is a problem between .doc and .odt files where .odt can use either Highlighting or Background Colour to set the colour behind a character. .doc files can only do one of these, so there is confusion if the other is used. (I first came across this incompatibility problem over 10 years ago and it still looks like it isn't fixed .

If this solves the problem, please edit your original post title to [Solved].

[John_Ha]

... and another simple way is to highlight each set of bullets and click the bullets icon to remove the bulleting so you have plain text. Now click it again to replace the bulleting.

The replacement bullets don't have the green background - they are the standard Writer bullets, not the imported MS Word bullets. Check by observing Format > Bullets and Numbering > Options is different from before.

I am now certain it is a .doc / .odt incompatibility.

[RoryCV]

I tried the second thing you posted first since it was easier. Now this just boggles my mind as to why it did what it did. It fixed it then when I opened it, the first section still had green highlights. Then when I fixed it and reopened it, the second section had them. Fixed it, then the third section. Each time I would fix one section the section below it would then revert back to the green highlights. It just confuses me greatly as to why that would happen.

However I was able to find the options of whatever style they were done in and removed it from there and everything is set now. I can not thank you enough, this has been something that has irked me greatly for several weeks.

[Zizi64]

Just a tip:
Use the native ODF formats (.odt in this case), and purge your document from the unwanted, unused WinWord related character styles. There is a lot of unused character styles in your document - created in WinWord (or at the conversion, when you saved as .doc type file)

[RoryOF]

Or simply don't use automatic Bullets and Numbering and insert a * or other display character as first character for each previously bulleted line.

[John_Ha]

... or Insert > Special character > General punctuation > choose U+2022 for small; or ...> Geometric shapes > U+25CF for big. I have a tiny macro to add them which offers small? or large? when I run it.

[COKEDUDE]

When I had this issue I just copied the first line of my sentence into my browser search bar, then copied it again back into the writer program. The reason this works is when you copy the data into the browser it loses all special attributes. When you copy it back then your first line has no attributes.