Changing the colour of the rubrics in Word – I

Many people print out pages from Universalis by pasting them into Microsoft Word. One user has asked me for a way to make the rubrics darker, because they come out pale gold on his printer. So here is a way of changing the colour of the rubrics. I’ve used Word 2002 for this, but I expect that other versions will be similar.

I’m assuming that you have the Universalis program for Windows and you have copied a page from it by pressing Ctrl+C and have pasted it into a Word document.

1. Finding out the colour of the rubrics

I can tell you at once that the colour of the rubrics in the Universalis program for Windows is currently red=192, green=128, blue=0. But I’m putting this section in anyway, because I can’t guarantee that the colours will always be identical.

First, highlight a bit of a rubric in the text.

Next, use the command Format > Font… to bring up the Font dialog box:

Click on the “Font Color” box and select “More Colors” from the menu:

Note the “Red”, “Green” and “Blue” values that are shown. Then cancel everything.

2. Changing the  colour

Make sure you haven’t selected (highlighted) any text, because you want the changes to apply to the whole document.

Do Edit > Replace, or press Ctrl+H:

Press “More” to get the extra options:

Click on the “Find What” box, then click on the “Format” button at the bottom and choose “Font” from the menu.

In the Font dialog box, click on “Font color” and select “More Colors” from the menu.

In the Colors dialog box, select the “Custom” tab.

Now type the numbers you found earlier into the ‘Red’, ‘Green’ and ‘Blue’ boxes.

Then press OK, and OK again, until you are back in the Replace dialog box. You’ll see that the “Find what” box now has a colour listed under it:

You are nearly there. Next, click on the “Replace with” box and then click on “Format” and select “Font” from the menu.

In the Font dialog box, click on “Font Color” and pick the new colour you want to give to the rubrics. Then press OK, and OK again to get back to the Replace dialog box:

Finally, press “Replace All”, and all your rubrics will change colour.

This all takes much less long to do than to say. Since you will be doing it more than once, you may want to record this action as a macro and perhaps even assign a keystroke to it.