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How to highlight in Google Docs on iPhone, iPad, and Android

The highlight tool is in the mobile app, but it is three taps deep and easy to miss. Here is where it is, how to take a highlight off again, and the one thing the phone app cannot do.

Highlight text in the Google Docs app

1. Open the document and tap the pencil button (bottom right) to enter editing mode.
2. Press and hold a word, then drag the handles to select the passage you want.
3. Tap the Format button at the top: the letter A with horizontal lines next to it.
4. On the Text tab, scroll down to Highlight color and pick a color.

The same steps work on iPhone, iPad, and Android. On an iPad with a keyboard, the desktop shortcuts for bold and italic work, but there is still no keyboard shortcut for highlight on any platform.

Remove a highlight on mobile

Select the highlighted text, open Format, go to Highlight color, and choose None at the top of the palette. To remove every highlight in the document at once, that is a desktop job: see how to highlight in Google Docs for the select-all method.

Tips that save taps

• Double-tap a word to select it, then drag the end handle. It is faster than press-and-hold.
• The last color you used stays selected in the palette, so highlighting a series of passages in one color is: select, Format, tap, done.
• Do not rely on tiny color differences. Phone screens and night mode shift colors, and two similar yellows are impossible to tell apart later. Use two or three clearly different colors.
• Comments are the other half. Select text and tap the plus button, then Comment, to attach a note. Highlights mark what mattered; comments say why.

What only works on a computer

Google Docs add-ons do not run in the mobile apps. The Extensions menu does not exist on a phone or tablet, so any highlighter add-on, including ours, is desktop only. What that means in practice:

• You can highlight on your phone in the app's built-in colors, and those highlights are ordinary Google Docs highlights. Nothing is lost.
• When you are back at a computer, an add-on can read them. Highlight Harvest gathers every highlight in the document, including ones made on a phone, into a list grouped by color.
• If you name your colors in Highlight Harvest ("Key claim", "Follow up", "Quote"), match those to the app's palette on your phone so a phone highlight lands in the right group. The add-on's palette uses standard Docs colors for exactly this reason.

Common problems

• No Format button. You are in reading mode. Tap the pencil first.
• Highlight color is greyed out. Nothing is selected, or you selected an image. Select text.
• The highlight disappeared after syncing. It has not; you are probably looking at a different version. Pull to refresh, or check File → Version history on a computer.
• Someone else's highlights look different on my phone. Colors render slightly differently between the web and the app. They are the same highlights.