How to Remove Grey Background in Google Docs [Updated 2024]

| | March 20, 2024

Google Docs has become an essential tool for individuals and professionals alike, enabling seamless collaboration and efficient document creation.

As you work on your documents, you may encounter shaded or grey areas that interfere with your desired formatting. This sometime happens, when you copy content from third-party sources and paste it into your Google Docs document.

However, removing the grey background is quite easy and you can also take steps to ensure that grey background doesn't appear in the first place. 

In this blog article, we will walk you through the process of removing shading or grey (or gray) areas in Google Docs to format it the way you have liked.

Let's get started.

Note: This article contains affiliate links. When you click an affiliate link and make a purchase, we get a small compensation at no cost to you. See our Privacy Policy and Disclaimer for more info.

Remove Grey Background in Google Docs

Ways to Remove Grey Background in Google Docs

So, here are the step-by-step method to remove the grey background from your documents.

Step 1: Accessing Google Docs

Open your web browser and go to the Google Docs homepage by visiting this link - https://docs.google.com

Sign in to your Google account or create one if you don't have it already. Once signed in, you will be directed to the Google Docs main interface.

Now, click on Blank document to create a new document in Google Docs.

Open Blank Document in Google Docs

Step 2: Selecting Text with Grey Background

While working with Google Docs and copying & pasting content from external sources you may observe that your text has some type of grey shading as shown below.

It may also happen that you have accidentally applied grey background or grey shading and now you're struggling to remove them. However, it is quiet easy to remove these shadings from your Google document.

Below you can see that I have two paragraphs with two different types of shading:

  1. The first paragraph has grey highlight color in background
  2. The second paragraph has grey shading color in background
Highlight Shading Color on Text

In the next step, we'll learn how to remove these grey background in Google Docs document.

Also Read: How to make a matrix in Google Docs

Step 3: Removing Highlight Color in Google Docs

First we will learn how to remove the highlight color from our text. And to do that, we will first select the text as shown below.

Remove Highlight Color Shading

After selecting the text, click on Highlight colour and select None as shown above. As you click None, the highlight color will be removed from your text. See the below screenshot.

Highlight Color Removed in Google Docs

Step 4: Removing Shading in Google Docs

Now, we will remove the shading from the second paragraph as marked in the above screenshot.

To remove the shading in Google Docs, select the whole paragraph containing the shading. Below you can see that I have selected the second paragraph that contains the grey shading or background.

Borders and Shading in Google Docs

After selecting the text, click on Format from the the top menu, and click on Paragraph styles, and then click on Borders and shading.

A Borders and shading dialog box will open. Click on Background colour option and select None to remove the shading.

Remove Shading in Google Docs

As you click on None, you will see that shading has been removed from your text.

Shading Removed in Google Docs

This is how you can remove highlight color and grey background in your Google document.

Wrapping Up

By following these simple steps, you can easily remove shading, grey background or highlight color from your text or paragraph.

I hope you like this tutorial on how to remove grey background in Google Docs. If you've liked it, please share it with your friends on social media.

For more useful tips and tutorials, please checkout the below mentioned blog articles.

Photo of author

Mamta Choudhary

Mamta Choudhary is the co-founder of Technicalwall.com. She is an expert content writer and is a skilled graphic designer. She mainly write tutorial articles on various software and tools including graphic designing tools like Canva, and others.