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This is perhaps one of the most impressive tricks I’ve seen recently with using Microsoft Word.
Have you ever had the occasion when you needed to select a chunk of text out of a document, but it wasn’t necessarily in a straight line or list that you needed to grab?
If you’ll look at the image above as my example, let’s say I had the list of items on the left, but wanted to get rid of all the text on the right (highlighted in the blue block). The lines of text on the right are part of the lines of text that I want to keep.
I can’t just select the chunk on the right and leave the list of text on the right unselected in the document. Or can I?
Did you know if you hold the "ALT" key down while dragging your mouse in a Word document you can select the text that you specifically grab with your mouse and cursor. It doesn’t automatically jump from line to line as you extend your selection.
In the example below I held down "ALT" and then dragged my cursor from the bottom-left corner of the blue box up to the top-right corner of the box to select the text as it’s highlighted.
I then just hit the "DELETE" key and ta-da! I’ve got my list of text on the right that’s ready to be edited, all left alone in their lines of data.
There are a number of times where this has come in handy for me, now that you know it’s possible. Let me know where you’ve used it and how it’s helped you.
Image: Snagit of Word application in Office 2007 suite
Hello, This has helped me tremendously! My neighbor and I are working on formatting e-books and her computer is acting… difficult. So she sends the documents over to me and I work on them. There would be extra spaces in the left margin that we could not figure out how to get rid of without manually deleting every single space. A very tedious business. But thanks to your “trick” we don’t have to do all of that! thank you sooo very much!
Jason. Sorry I misunderstood. I’ve tested the ALT thing now and its way cool :)
No, the CTRL key let’s you select separate sections of text simultaneously but it still follows the natural left-to-right flow of the text that you have to select. ALT let’s you select literally a block of text right out of the middle (or anywhere) of your document, across lines, words and paragraphs.
Don’t you mean the CTRL key? (unless you have your keyboard remapped)
btw, I knew about this but forgot it… so thanks for the reminder!