Conditional formatting of drop-down menu items

[Christopher Wilson]

Hello everyone. I'm very new to VBA, and I've ordered VBA for dummies so I'm not averse to learning VBA to program Excel and Word. However, I'm in a bit of a time crunch so I would greatly appreciate your assistance. I want to assign the color red to the font for the selection "Choose an item" in a drop-down menu and black (or the default color) for the other selections. I want "Choose an item" to be red so that it stands out for users to know that a selection needs to be made. I've searched the web for VBA code and have made several attempts but it's not working for me. My document is currently saved as a *.docm document. I've added "Developer" to my ribbon. It appears I have two choices for a drop-down menu: Drop-Down List Content Control and Combo Box (ActiveX Control). What I would greatly appreciate from you all are the step-by-step instructions. Again, I'm very new to all of this, so I need a "recipe" to produce the document. I thank you all in advance and wish each and every one of you a very happy, healthy and prosperous new year!

[gmayor]

You don't need a macro for this. The colour of the placeholder text of a content control is dependent on the built-in placeholder text character style. You can modify the colour of that style from grey to red in that document.
If you want to do that with a macro, you need the line

ActiveDocument.Styles("Placeholder Text").Font.Color = wdColorRed

You may find https://www.gmayor.com/insert_content_control_addin.htm useful

[Christopher Wilson]

Per your post, I did more research. I modified Placeholder Text (Always Hidden) under Styles / Manage Styles, but it doesn't work. I prefer not to use a macro unless I have to. Thank you.

[Christopher Wilson]

Please disregard. I believe I've got it to work. Thank you again for your assistance.