I was wondering if there is a way to automatically highlight a larger number of words with a specific background colour in a libre office writer document? I would have a list of many words either as simple text file or as calc document and would like that all these words are for example highlighted on each occurance in yellow in a long text document. Is that possible somehow without doing it manually with the search function?
The answer to your question depends on the purpose of the words.
If they are part of the discourse and have an “intrinsic” importance in the development of the argument, the words should be marked up in some way. Mark up in Writer is achieved with character style. You created a new one and you needn’t really make it different from Default style. Thus the words are just displayed the same as others in the paragraph.
When you need to identify them, you modify the character style for colour or background and they become highlighted.
Of course, this is not practical in a long existing document or for words which can’t be qualified as “intrinsically important”. You have a clumsy alternate.
Select a target word and Insert>Index & Tables>Index entry, check Apply to all similar text. Do the same for all other words. Your words get a grey background.
The drawbacks of this method are: you pollute your eventual index and, worse, removing the words from the index is a real pain because it must be done individually.
There might be a way of doing this with a macro but I’ve never written any one. Maybe another helper could suggest something.