Change text colour on mouse trail tutorial

Hi all. I was wondering how you change the text colour with action script. The Kirupa mouse trail tutorial I was looking at has the following script for the text:

letterformat = new TextFormat();
letterformat.font = “Verdana”;
letterformat.align = “center”;
letterformat.size = “10”;

I thought I could change the color by adding:

letterformat.color = “#FFCC00”;

Is there a way to do this or am I way off track? Any help much appreciated.