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 highlights all the way from the beginning to the end of that word, including the space after it. Usually, this behavior is what you want, and lets you drag somewhat sloppily.
Tip
If you dislike the way Word automatically selects in one-word increments, you can turn it off by choosing Word → Preferences and clicking the Edit tab. The checkbox called “When selecting, automatically select entire word” is the on/off switch for this feature.
Every now and then, however, you do want to edit only the first syllable of a word—perhaps to correct a typo. In those situations, Word’s tendency to highlight the entire word can induce madness. On those occasions, press the Option key as you drag. Word responds by respecting the precise movements of your mouse.
Clicking with the mouse. Using the mouse and not dragging can save you time. Double-click a word to select that one word as a whole. Triple-click to select an entire paragraph.
With one paragraph selected in this way, hold down Shift and click the mouse elsewhere, even pages away, to select more text in one-paragraph increments.
Using the Shift key and the mouse. By using the Shift key, you can enjoy all the convenience of using the mouse without the wrist-wearying effort of holding down the mouse button. Just click at where you want to start selecting, hold down the Shift key, then click the mouse a second time where you want the selection to end (even if you have to scroll the document between clicks). Word highlights everything between the two clicks. If you overshoot the mark, you can back up in one-unit (letter, word, paragraph, whatever) increments by holding down Shift and clicking back into the selection. (Unfortunately, you can’t change the beginning of the selection using this method.)
Using Shift with other keys. If you do a lot of word processing, you may find it faster to keep your hands at the keyboard as much as possible, without stopping to grasp the mouse. In fact, it’s possible to select text without using the mouse at all. Just use the arrow keys to get to where you want to begin selecting. Hold down the Shift key and use the arrow keys to adjust the size of the selection—line by line for the up and down arrow keys, and one character at a time for the right and left arrow keys.
If you hold down Option and Shift, the right and left arrow keys select in one-word increments, and the up and down arrow keys select in one-paragraph increments. (Your original selection is preserved, however, even if it was only part of a paragraph.)
You can use the Shift key with the Home, End, and Page Up/ Page Down keys as well. Shift-Home or Shift-End selects from the insertion point to the beginning or end of the line.
Shift-Page Up/Page Down selects one “screenful” (about half a page, depending on your monitor size) up or one down from the insertion point.
Using ⌘ with the mouse. Here’s a great command to memorize: ⌘-click anywhere within a sentence to select exactly that sentence, neatly and quickly, period and all. Release the ⌘ key and click to deselect the sentence, then ⌘-click again to select a different sentence.
Using the selection strip. To the left of your text, just inside the left window edge, is a thin margin—an empty white space about a quarter of an inch wide. It’s an invisible but extremely useful tool called the selection strip. (In Page Layout view, the selection strip is beefier—about as wide as the visible margin.)
When your cursor ventures into this area, the arrow pointer points to the right instead of left as usual. Now you can click once to highlight a single line of text, twice to select a paragraph, or three times to select the whole document.
Tip
⌘-clicking in the selection strip also highlights the entire document—unless some text is already selected. If that’s the case, ⌘-clicking selects an additional line instead. As for the peculiar highlighting that appears when you Option-⌘-click in the selection strip: Well, you tell us what Word’s doing.
You can also drag vertically through the selection strip to highlight a vertical chunk of text—one of this strip’s most frequent uses. (As always, you can click there once, then Shift-click elsewhere in your document to highlight all lines of text between the two clicks.)
Using Extend mode. Pressing F8 activates Extend mode, the most powerful (if disorienting) way to select text. Position the insertion point where you want to begin selecting, activate Extend mode, then use the arrow and Page Up or Down keys to select text automatically. (Microsoft has removed the Extend mode EXT button from the Status bar in Word 2008—so you can only tell it’s active by the odd selection behavior.) To cancel Extend mode, press ⌘-period to turn it off.
Exactly as when you’re not in Extend mode, pressing the Option key with the arrows forces Word to select in one-word (right and left arrow) or one-paragraph (up and down arrow) increments.
Note
Early versions of Word let you use the numeric keypad as cursor keys. By pressing Shift-Clear, you brought out the pad’s second personality as a navigation keyboard, where the keys surrounding the 5 key acted as cursor keys, the 0 key acted as Insert, and so on. But Microsoft evidently fielded one too many desperate tech-support calls from customers who’d entered this mode accidentally, and couldn’t figure out why they could no longer type numbers with the numeric keypad. Ever since Word 2001, the number keypad has done just one thing—type numbers.
To use Word’s multiple-selection feature, highlight a piece of text using any of the methods described above involving the mouse. Then press ⌘ as you use the mouse to select more text. Bingo: You’ve highlighted two separate chunks of text.
For instance, drag to select part of a sentence. Then scroll down a couple of pages and, while pressing ⌘ , triple-click to select another entire paragraph. Finally, you can ⌘-double-click a single word to add it to the batch selection.
Note
Selecting text using the Shift key and keyboard, then pressing ⌘ and using the mouse to select additional areas creates (or adds to) a multi-selection. Multi-selections have to be in the same document (you can’t select text simultaneously in different windows).
When you’re done selecting bits of text here and there, you can operate on them en masse. For example:
You can make them all bold or italic with one fell swoop.
When you cut, copy, or paste (as described in the next section), the command acts upon all your multi-selections at once.
You can drag any one of the highlighted portions to a new area, confident that the other chunks will come along for the ride. All of the selected areas will wind up consolidated in their new location.
Tip
This feature has special ramifications for the Find command described on Find. The Find dialog box has a “Highlight all items found” checkbox. It makes the software perform your work for you, simultaneously highlighting every occurrence of a certain word or phrase within the entire file.