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Selecting With the Magic Box

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Here's a handy trick to kick off your weekend.

You've got a few columns of text in a Word document, separated by tabs. 
They're not in a table.

Now, you want to format just one of the columns without impacting the text in
any of the other ones.  Think you have to manually select and format every
word in the column manually?  Not so!

Simply hold down the Alt key and drag a box around the text you want to
format.  Let go of the Alt key and all of the text within the box is
selected!  Apply formatting until your heart is content.  Or, perhaps
click Copy to put the selected text on the clipboard.

Use ALT+Drag to select a box of text in Word

The same trick works in the Visual Studio text editor as well... on a monospaced
file it can sometimes work miracles!  You'll find that this works in all
modern versions of Word.

By the way, the selected text is blue instead of black in the picture above
because I used Word 12 to grab the screenshot.  Unlike previous versions of
Word which used a simple inversion of the background and text colors to show
selection, Word 12 uses a lightened version of the Windows selection color.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 13, 2006
    I've seen the feature before, but couldn't ever think of when it'd be useful. I'm a big fan of tables in Word, so I'd probably have just used the text-to-table conversion to make a table and continue formatting from there.

    But it does freak people out to see half of a character highlighted. That's kinda fun.
  • Anonymous
    January 13, 2006
    I remeber using this a lot in the original version of Word for Windows through school. It vanished in subsequent releases until pretty recently.
  • Anonymous
    January 13, 2006
    Cool. If I can remember it for next time I will use it, would have been useful in the past for sure.
    However the challenge is how do you find these little tips. "Tip of the day type" feature can be most annoying, looking in help is ok if you know what you are looking for and find it quickly, otherwise almost impossible.
  • Anonymous
    January 13, 2006
    Can't think of its usefulness!? OMG, I use this at least once a week in Word when editing documentation. Even moreso, I use it in Visual Studio on nearly a daily basis. Most people don't see the purpose of the feature, but once you know about it and start using it, you'll fall in love with it, too. Trust me.

    On a side note, Notepad2 has the same capability, but it lets you select regions by using the keyboard arrows. VS needs that.
  • Anonymous
    January 13, 2006
    A shame about dropping the selection-inversion feature. My mom always uses it, along with all sorts of optical illusions, when teaching her class about light, optics, eyesight and vision.
  • Anonymous
    January 13, 2006
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    January 13, 2006
    Michael Flanakin wrote:
    > On a side note, Notepad2 has the same
    > capability, but it lets you select regions
    > by using the keyboard arrows. VS needs that.

    VS does let you use the keyboard after you initiate the selection with the mouse.
  • Anonymous
    January 13, 2006
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    January 13, 2006
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    January 13, 2006
    I also use this fature a lot. But one problem I often face is that if you try to use it in a table cell the "lookup"-bar (in german "nachschlagen" ) comes up instead (which gets really annoying after a while and some unsuccessful attempts).

    A little comment on this "lookup"-feature: I kind of like and repeatedly use it, but does it really have to come up when I press ALT and click on a word or text?
  • Anonymous
    January 13, 2006
    I like the feature and it could have helped me a lot in the past. I have also come across another helpful feature that I am sure most already know about (I am usually the last).
    If you want to highlight a certain amount of text, just click on the place you wish the highlight to end. Now hold the Shift key down and click where you want it to start.
  • Anonymous
    January 13, 2006
    Jensen wrote:

    "You'll find that this works in all modern versions of Word."

    I believe that it used to be CTRL + dragging in earlier Word versions. I seem to remember using it in Word running Windows 3.11 For Workgroups.
  • Anonymous
    January 13, 2006
    I know about this feature at least 8 years. What is so special new about Office 12?
  • Anonymous
    January 13, 2006
    Dovydas,

    I didn't say this had anything to do with Office 12. In fact I explicitly said "You'll find that this works in all modern versions of Word."

    It's just a tip to help people get more out of the Office version they have.
  • Anonymous
    January 14, 2006
    Wow. That's even cooler than Shift+F3 trick which gave me "The MS Office Genius" fame once. ;]

    Thanks.
  • Anonymous
    January 14, 2006
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    January 17, 2006
    Actually in WFW 1.0 you just clicked and dragged with second mouse button. When Word 6 added contextual menus it was moved to Alt Click
  • Anonymous
    February 02, 2006
    A
    couple of weeks ago, I wrote about holding down the Alt key while selecting
    text in Word to draw...
  • Anonymous
    February 02, 2006
    This is a great tip.. I've been a word users for as long as I can remember and the power tips still manage to come out of the woodwork!
  • Anonymous
    February 13, 2006
    PingBack from http://blog.jensthebrain.de/archives/2006/02/13/office-12-word/