How to Highlight in Notion
Formatting text for my notes is always something that I do as an afterthought. However, once I do it, my text always looks much more interesting to read. Highlighting text is a core component of identifying what is essential. Notion makes it very easy to highlight text.
So how do you highlight in Notion? Enclosed below are the steps to highlight in Notion:
- Open Notion to the Page with the Text You Want to Highlight
- Select the Text by Clicking and Dragging Your Mouse across the Text
- Select Your Text Background color either by:
- Clicking the Text Color button in the “Text Formatting” menu (for specific words) or
- Typing “/” followed by the color, a space and then typing background and clicking “Enter” or selecting the background color from the options
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Link to Beginner’s Guide to Using Notion With Screenshots
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Highlighting in Notion using Text Formatting Menu
The first thing you need to do is open up Notion to the page containing the text you want to highlight.
![](https://cdn-0.theproductiveengineer.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/image-2-31-1024x528.jpg)
In our example, I want to highlight the following sentence:
“Data is read in using connection interfaces.“
![](https://cdn-0.theproductiveengineer.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/image-2-32-1024x347.jpg)
Highlight the word or words you want to highlight by clicking and dragging across the word or phrase you want to highlight.
![](https://cdn-0.theproductiveengineer.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/image-2-33-1024x471.jpg)
The “Text Formatting” menu will appear once you have highlighted some text. Click on the “A” button. This is the text color button.
![](https://cdn-0.theproductiveengineer.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/image-2-34-380x1024.jpg)
A contextual menu will appear as shown in the above screenshot. There are two sections:
- color
- background
Color changes the color of the text while background changes the background color of the text. We want to choose a background color so choose one of the colors from the “background” menu.
![](https://cdn-0.theproductiveengineer.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/image-2-35-1024x338.jpg)
Notice in the text formatting menu bar that the text color button now has the background color you just set. Click away from the text formatting bar to make it go away.
![](https://cdn-0.theproductiveengineer.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/image-2-36-1024x449.jpg)
As you can see, I chose yellow as my text background color and my sentence now have a yellow highlight.
If you are interested in learning how to implement a Zettelkasten system in Notion, check out our Complete Guide to Zettelkasten in Notion.
Highlighting in Notion using Slash Method
If there is a whole text block you want to highlight, it can be easier to simply use the slash “/” method.
![](https://cdn-0.theproductiveengineer.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/image-2-37-1024x515.jpg)
Open up Notion to a page that contains a block of text that you want to be highlighted.
![](https://cdn-0.theproductiveengineer.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/image-2-38.jpg)
Go to either the start or end of the text block and type “/” followed by the color, a space and then the word “background”. So, for example, if I want to create a blue highlight for my text block I would type:
“/blue background“
Press “Enter” to add the highlight color to the text. Alternatively, you can type “/blue” or whatever color you want from the available colors in Notion and select it from the contextual menu that appears as shown above.
![](https://cdn-0.theproductiveengineer.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/image-2-39-1024x281.jpg)
As you can see, our text block is now highlighted in blue.
The available colors in Notion are:
- Gray
- Brown
- Orange
- Yellow
- Green
- Blue
- Purple
- Red
- Pink
I hope this tutorial was helpful to you. Good luck!
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