Office 2008 for Macintosh: The Missing Manual

The Many Ways to Select Text

Dragging with the mouse is the way most people first learned to select text. In this time-honored method, you click at the start of where you want to select text, and while holding down the mouse button, drag until the text in question is highlighted.

Note

Don’t forget Word’s multi-selection feature, which has been around since Word X. You can select bits of text far apart from each other simultaneously and then cut, copy, and paste them all at once. You can grab a single sentence from the first paragraph of a document and a couple sentences from the second—and scrap everything else (see Multi-Selection).

Assuming you mastered dragging a long time ago, here are some more streamlined ways to select text. (Some of these moves are second nature to power users.)

• Shift-arrow. If you undershoot or overshoot the mark when dragging manually, don’t start over—just remember the Shift–arrow key trick. After you release the mouse button, don’t click again or do anything else. Hold down the Shift key and then press the arrow keys to expand or shrink the size of the selection—one character or line at a time. Add the Option key to expand or shrink the selection one word at a time.

• Dragging with the mouse and Option key. When dragging with the mouse, you’ll notice that Word highlights text in one-word chunks, under the assumption that you’ll very rarely want to edit only the first syllable of a word. Even if you begin dragging in the center of a word, the program instantly ...