Why do my Microsoft Word documents have a blue background?

Don't panic. Believe it or not, I think you've actually found a feature of Microsoft Word, not some sort of bug in your documents or computer. For legibility sake, Word allows you to specify white text on a blue background in addition to the more common black text against a white background.

Obviously, you don't want to leave it setup that way, so let me show you how to change it in Microsoft Word for the Mac - it's basically the same for the Windows version of Word too.

Start up Microsoft Word and go to Preferences (on the PC it's "Options..."), then click on the General option. The choices look like this:

The third option down, "blue background, white text", is what you have accidentally checked. Simply uncheck it, click Okay and your document -- and future documents you open in Microsoft Word -- should be back to normal.

Notice a few more options here too: "Show Project Gallery at startup" is one that many Word users are delighted to turn off once they've gotten the hang of using the program, and "WYSIWYG font and styles menus" can make it quite a bit easier to work with complex styles in particular, but it's also cool for fonts too.

Hope that gets you back with Word.