I'm trying to figure out why the section headings in my document are highlighted (in yellow) in the Table of Contents.

I don't want them to be highlighted and within the document they don't appear to be highlighted.

Both highlight and shading are set to 'No Color'.

Any advice?

Presumably, shading have been applied to one or more of the TOC styles (TOC 1, TOC 2, etc.) that determine the formatting of entries in the table of contents. Click in an affected TOC entry. Press Ctrl+Shift+S to display the Apply Styles pane. Click Modify. Make sure that text color is what you want (normally, "Automatic" does the trick). Then click the Format drop down and click Border. On the Shading tab, select "No Color" for "Fill." Click OK twice. Repeat the procedure if additional levels in the TOC are also affected.

Hi BC_user,

Based on your description, did you get the issue as shown in the following figure?

If you do have your paragraph marks showing then you can just select the paragraph mark and apply the No Color highlighting. Even though the paragraph mark itself isnt highlighted, that mark stores the highlighting inside it and this is what causes the auto number/bullet to remain highlighted.

Once you select the paragraph mark and clear the highlighting, it disappears from the auto number/bullet. Now, update the TOC which might there are several update field macros. Please try these steps:

Go to References tab- click Update Table- select Update entire table- click OK.

You could refer to this article and get more information about your issue:

https://cybertext.wordpress.com/2011/05/13/word-highlight-remains-even-after-ive-cleared-it/

Please Note: Since the web site is not hosted by Microsoft, the link may change without notice. Microsoft does not guarantee the accuracy of this information.

After this method, please check if it works fine. Im glad to help and follow up your reply.

Hope its helpful.

Regards,

George Zhao
TechNet Community Support