Making changes to information in a document you create in Google Docs is very easy, especially when it comes to formatting elements such as font style, text size, or color. Adjusting the look of your information might be a good idea for document types where visual style is more important, but it might not be desirable or even strictly forbidden in a more formal environment.
Certain types of documents are enhanced by applying colorful or creative text effects to them. Google Docs has a number of visual settings, such as page orientation, that can affect how your audience reacts to your document. These are usually documents designed to visually grab the reader’s attention. For situations like this, it is usually recommended to use fun fonts, large text, and colorful text.
But many documents that you will need to create for school or work will have special formatting requirements, one of which is usually that the document contains only black text. Therefore, if you are editing a document with text in other colors, you may need to learn how to switch that text color. Our article below shows you how to change text colors in Google Docs.
How to remove text color in Google Docs
- Open your document.
- Highlight colored text.
- Click the Text Color button.
- Choose black.
Our guide continues below with more information on how to change the color of text in Google Docs, including images of these steps.
How to switch text color back to black in Google Docs (Guide with images)
The steps in this article were done in Google Chrome, but will work in other desktop web browsers as well. After you follow the steps in this article, the selected text in the document will return to black by default.
Step 1. Go to your Google Drive at https://drive.google.com/drive/my-drive and open the document containing the text color you want to change.
Step 2: Select the text in the wrong color.
If you want to change the text color of the entire document, click somewhere inside the document, then press Ctrl + A on your keyboard to select everything.
Step 3: Click the Text Color button on the toolbar above the document, then select black for the text color.
Have other formatting changes been applied to your text that you would also like to remove? Learn how to clear formatting in Google Docs and quickly restore selected text to its default state.
Google Slides handles content and formatting a little differently, so it can be difficult for you to work with this app. You can check out this tutorial for information on removing a text box in Google Slides, which is the main way to add text to this type of document.
How to remove text formatting including color, font size, etc.
While the steps in this article focus primarily on removing text color, you have another tool that can remove font color, background color, and some other formatting effects that might be applied to some content in your document.
Once you have selected the text you want that contains unwanted formatting options, click the Clear Formatting button in the toolbar above the document. It’s a T-shaped button with a diagonal line through it. You can also click the Format tab at the top of the window and choose Clear Formatting from that menu instead. Alternatively, you can use the Ctrl + keyboard shortcut to remove all formatting from the selected text.
More information on how to change text color in Google Docs
When you change the font color in Google Docs, there is no way to revert to the default text color other than using the Clear Formatting option. However, when you select the text you want to change and then use the clear formatting option, this changes the font settings other than the text color.
Often when you want to change the font color or highlight color in a Google document, the best way to do it is to just highlight the text, then click the Font Color button (or whatever setting you are trying to customize), then choose a font color, font style, or color selection which you would prefer to use. If you are trying to revert to the default state, then you probably want black, which is listed in the upper left corner of the color picker menu.
Most other Google apps like Google Sheets and Google Slides use a similar technique when you want to remove a custom text color or change the text color for a word, sentence, paragraph, or other amount of text in one of your documents.