Is there a reason why the rest has to be rich text too?

I'm with Alex. Does it need to be Rich Text? If you set it as plain text, all formatting will automatically be removed

The main reason for the rich text format is that some of the content have link to web sites as part of the text and some information have formatting like numbered list and bullets, bold, italics, etc.

I just want to get rid of the colored background that comes with pasting some text from other sources. This is very distracting.

Thanks

I've done a bit of searching on the Google Machine and it appears like this would be an all or none situation.
You can't "have your cake and eat it too" so to speak.

There are ways to strip all formatting.  Unfortunately you would just have to either put up with the pasted formatting as is OR selectively edit the pasted info to remove the undesired attributes.

Where's the macro recorder in access when you need it?

When you select the control and bring up the properties is there not a value there that can be changed?

Hi,

I could not find a property about highlight or text back color in the properties.

I really miss the macro recorder in Access

So it looks like either I live with the sometime weird colors or switch to plain text. I will discuss with my team.

Thanks for all you help guys.

Hi Michel, a rich text field's formatting is done with HTML tags.  A highlighted text in a rich text field would look something like this in HTML, which is embedded in the field in Access:

<font style="background-color:#ffff00">my text</font>

You can see the HTML with a statement such as MsgBox Me!MyRichTextField.

To remove the highlight, you need to remove the <font...> and </font> tags.  It's not a trivial task to remove <font...> because it may have many different attributes you can't predict in advance, like font size, color, etc.  But a tag always ends with ">".  I would use the InStr() function to search for the text "<font" and ">" and delete everything in between.  And of course, it helps to be well-versed in HTML as well.  To remove other types of formatting, you need to be familiar with other tags.

Good point Kevin!

Wasn't thinking about that, cheers @Kevin.
Just use MSHTML, parse the HTML into it actual elements then you can check for certain properties, remove them, then resave.
This would make a cool tip/seminar.

Thank you for suggestion,

I will look at setting this up, hope fully it will not be beyond my VBA capabilities

Here is a sample code that will remove highlights in a rich text box.  I tested it and it worked, but be sure to modify it to your needs.  The HTML tag attribute for a highlight is "background-color" within a <font> tag.  My code removes it if it is found inside a <font> tag.  But it won't remove it if "background-color" is legitimate text in your data.  There may be multiple <font> tags, and the code looks for all.  Note that Access may put line breaks within the tags, and my code replaces them with spaces for easier processing. Call this function with, e.g.: Me!MyRichTextField = RemoveHighlights(Me!MyRichTextField)

Private Function RemoveHighlights(s As String) As String
    Dim pos As Integer, pos2 As Integer, pos3 As String
    Dim s2 As String, s3 As String
    
    ' Replace line breaks in the string with spaces.
    s = Replace(s, Chr(13) & Chr(10), " ")
    
    ' Find first instance of the opening tag "<font ".
    pos = InStr(1, s, "<font ")
    
    ' If found, run do loop below.
    Do While pos <> 0
    
        ' Find next instance of ">".
        pos2 = InStr(pos + 6, s, ">")
        
        ' Get text between "<font " and ">".
        s2 = Mid(s, pos + 6, pos2 - pos - 6)
        
        ' Find instance of "background-color" within this string.
        pos3 = InStr(1, s2, "background-color")
        
        ' If found, remove "background-color" from this string
        '   and put modified string back to the original string.
        If pos3 <> 0 Then
            s3 = Replace(s2, "background-color", "")
            s = Replace(s, s2, s3)
        End If
        
        ' Continue to find next instance of "<font "
        pos = InStr(pos + 6, s, "<font ")
    Loop
    
    ' Return resulting string.
    RemoveHighlights = s
End Function

Nice

Thank you Kevin Yip,

I will give this a try as soon as I come back from vacation

I haven't tested it myself, but it looks solid at a glance. Thanks, Kevin.