By default, every new Google Doc you create features a stark, blindingly bright white background. While this perfectly mimics a physical sheet of printer paper, it can cause severe eye strain during late-night writing sessions and looks incredibly boring if you are designing a digital flyer or an interactive PDF. Thankfully, Google Docs allows you to instantly change the entire page background to any colour in the rainbow with just a few clicks.
How to Change the Page Color
This setting affects the entire document globally, meaning every single page will instantly adopt the new colour you choose.
- Open your document in Google Docs on a desktop web browser.
- In the top menu bar, click on File.
- Scroll all the way down to the bottom of the dropdown menu and click on Page setup.
- A small popup window will appear. Look at the bottom left corner for the section labelled Page color.
- Click the small circular white icon to open the colour palette.
- Click any of the default colours (like pastel yellow, soft blue, or dark grey) to select it.
- Click OK.
Your entire document will immediately change colour. If you selected a very dark background (like charcoal or navy blue), Google Docs will unfortunately not automatically change your font colour to white. You will need to press Ctrl + A (or Cmd + A) to highlight all your text and manually change the text colour to white so it remains readable against the new dark background.