Background hiliting of text in TextEdit

[R.L. Grigg]

I have a .rtf file where some of the text has been background hilited  
in yellow. In Pages or TextEdit I dont see how to alter that  
background hiliting. I can set the background color of the entire  
document but even that doesnt change the background hiliting of that  
text which is highly formatted etc so I dont want to just plaintext  
it. Surely I'm just missing where this attribute is set?
Russ