I am using Word 2011 for Mac. For the past week or so, I have been working on notes for programming, and had been shading anything involving code, similar to StackExchange format. The highlight button was in the same place as the character shading button was on the old Word for Windows that I was used to, so I was using that by mistake and going through and highlighting all my code with a grey highlighter.
Last night, Mac wanted to install an update, so I let it restart my computer. Today, when I went back to my document, all sixty pages of highlighting had disappeared.
I can't figure out an easy way to do shading. There isn't a button, like there used to be. Instead, I have to go into Borders and Shading and manually set it to 15%, which is a huge pain. I saved the 15% as a style so I could do things more easily, but Word will only let me apply styles to entire paragraphs, not individual words.
Strangely enough, it seems like there is some form of my old highlighting still present, but it's just invisible. When I try to apply Borders and Shading to some code that used to be highlighted, it doesn't appear. I can fix this by selecting the entire document and highlighting it in White. Is there a way to just get my old highlighting back so I don't have to go through 60+ pages and re-highlight every little bit of code?
Also, is there a better way to do shading of individual words with Word 2011 or am I just going to have to go into Borders and Shading each time? I don't know much about Word so could I maybe assign a hotkey to the shading? As far as I can tell, I can only assign it to styles, which apply the formatting to the whole paragraph.
Finally, is there a better program than Word for writing documents that contain code?
EDIT: I found that by going to manage styles, and then creating a new style while I had shaded text selected, I am allowed to change "Paragraph" to "Character" to have it only apply to text.
