How to highlight text in Mac Mail to emphasize your words

When you’re composing an email in the Mail app on your Mac, you may want to emphasize specific text. And while there are a few options like bold, italic, or underline, maybe you really want that text to stand out with highlighting. Unfortunately, the highlighted text isn’t one of the current built-in font options.

However, there is a way to make it an option by creating your own Style in the Mail app that you can use over and over. If you’re interested in adding this handy way to emphasize text, here’s how to do it and highlight text in the Mail app on Mac.

Highlight text in the Mail app on Mac

Creating this Style does take a few steps. But once you do it, you’ll be able to reuse that Style again and again. So, it’s worth a few minutes of time to set it up if you really want text highlighting in Mail.

How to highlight text in the Mail app on Mac

1) Open an editor on your Mac that allows for text highlighting. Google Docs in a web browser is perfect. Type in some text and highlight it using the application’s tool for highlighting.

2) After highlighting it, copy the highlighted text.

Highlight text in Google Docs

3) Open the TextEdit app, which comes built-in on all Macs, create a new document, and paste the highlighted text here.

Paste highlighted text in TextEdit app on Mac

4) Now, select the text in the TextEdit document, right-click or hold Control and click, and select Font > Styles.

Choose Font Styles in TextEdit app

5) When the text appears in the box, click Add to Favorites.

Add highlighted text to favorites on Mac

6) Give your Style a name, like Yellow Highlight, and click Add.

Give a name and save font style

That’s all there is to adding your new highlight Style. Now that you have your highlighting style set up, it’s time to put it to good use.

7) Open the Mail app and compose your email.

8) Select the text you want to highlight in the email.

9) Right-click and select Font > Styles.

Select text in Mail app and choose Font Styles

10) When the Style box opens, click Default and choose your Style name from the drop-down box.

Choose added font style for highlighted text

11) Finally, click Apply.

Apply highlighted text style to email on Mac

This will highlight the selected text of your email.

Text highlighted in Mail app on Mac

Remember, you can use your new highlighting Style whenever you want to make your email text stand out.

Until Apple gives us a convenient way to highlight text in the Mail app, this little trick comes in handy. Are you going to set up a Style so that you can highlight text in your emails? Let us know!

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