Wednesday, May 30, 2007

Highlight individual letters not a whole word

Just a quick tip to answer a question by an anonymous reader - how to stop Word automatically highlighting the whole word when you just want to highlight part of it?

Well, for this tip I think there is no choice but to use the mouse (though see this post about highlighting without using the mouse). The reason Word is highlighting whole words instead of individual letters is probably because of an option here:

Tools -> Options -> Edit [tab] and uncheck When selecting, automatically select entire word option and press OK.

This should do the trick - now you ought to be able to use the mouse to highlight individual letters.

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

useless

Anonymous said...

Yeah, not useless at all. Very helpful. Usually, I select the whole word when I want the whole word. If I select part of the word, I only want that part. Now, Word will follow my directions exactly.

Anonymous said...

thats really help ful thanks

John

Anonymous said...

this is very helpful. i am dealing with DNA sequences and i need to only highlight a portion of them to figure out how many base pairs i have in different parts of the sequences. highlighting part of a word is necessary in this case.

thanks!

markowe said...

Hey, great! Who would have thought it, right at the cutting edge!

Anonymous said...

On my Tools menu, there is no Option choice. Any suggestions?

Anonymous said...

On my Tools menu (for MS Word 2008 for Mac) there is no Option choice. Any other suggestions? I'm trying to find a solution, using the mouse, for the automatic highlighting of the whole word. It's driving me crazy.

Anonymous said...

This is by far the most useful MS Word tip I have ever seen. Thank you!

Anonymous said...

In Word 2007 the option can be found by select the Office Button > Word Options > Advanced

Anonymous said...

Great tip! This bug, or as Microsoft probably calls it "feature", has bothered me ever since it was introduced.

Anonymous said...

I tried unticking that box and it is still doing it.

markowe said...

Ahh, now that'll be because Office is full of bugs. I suppose restarting your computer and Word can't do any harm, but these kinds of bug are what infuriate us all on a daily basis...

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