Word Training – the many ways to select in Word…
Sometimes its just good to show the simple things in life, well at least in Word!!
Most people select text in a Word document by dragging the mouse over the words they wish to highlight. This is definitely one way of doing this, but did you know that there are other methods to do this simple task?
Next time you want to select something in Word, why not give one of these other techniques a go instead?
Ways of selecting
To select a line: position your ‘I’ pointer in the left hand margin of the document then click and drag for as many lines as you wish. You should see it selecting the text as you drag your cursor
To select a word: double left click in a word
To select a paragraph: triple left click in a word
To select a sentence: Hold down the Ctrl key on your keyboard and click in a word in that sentence
To select the whole document: Ctrl+A on your keyboard is a useful shortcut for selecting everything in your document
Format Painter button
This allows you to copy the format that is currently applied to some text in your document to another bit of text in the same document. To use this feature, you first select the text with the formatting you want to copy.
On your ribbon there should be a format painter button that you can click to activate (single clicking on button will allow you to ‘paste’ the formatting once, double clicking on the button will allow you to ‘paste’ the formatting multiple times until you turn it off. To turn it off, click the format painter button again or the Esc key on your keyboard).
Once you have activated it, you can then paste the formatting by clicking in a word, to just format a single word, or by selecting a line or paragraph to format more!
Happy selecting! More tips and skills can be found on our hints and tips page on our website here or by attending one of our Word courses that we have 3 levels of; Basic, Intermediate or Advanced.
You can also see our website here for more details.
If you liked this post, why not take a look at our previous one on why Project can be better than Excel sometimes?