1. On the Home tab, in the Paragraph group, click the arrow beside the
Borders button (its appearance may vary depending on what sort of border was
last applied, but it's the rightmost button the bottom row), and choose
Borders and Shading... at the very bottom of the menu.
2. In the Borders and Shading dialog, choose the Shading tab.
3. Under Fill, choose Black, then click OK.
4. If your font color is set to Automatic, then you will automatically get
white text, or you can explicitly set it to white. For reversed text it's
usually best to use a sans serif font and make it Bold (and not too small).
Note that if you want the box to extend beyond the text, there are two ways
to accomplish this:
1. You can use a table cell of the appropriate dimensions and fill that with
color.
2. You can apply a black border to the paragraph(s) by clicking Box on the
Border tab, which will then allow you to click Options... on the Border tab
and set the "Distance from text" to allow more space around your text.
--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
http://word.mvps.org
