Friday, June 1, 2007

Highlight any square block of text in Word using ALT

Now this tip is really nice, almost like magic if you have never used it before!

Normally when you use the mouse to highlight text, it will automatically highlight sentences and paragraphs across the screen, like this:

But you don't want it to do that, especially in a case like this, where you have two columns separated with tabs (though this is not the best way to format this text!!). You want to select a square block which will, say, only highlight one vertical strip of text, like this:

This is easy to do! Just press ALT and hold it down, then select using the left mouse button like you normally would. You will find that instead of Word "snapping" to words and whole lines, it will highlight a rectangular section of any size and dimensions you want, as in the picture above! Then you can copy and paste just the vertical section you have anywhere you want.

You can even cut a section right out of the middle of a text. Say, from the above paragraph, like so:

Just press ALT and hold it do

mally would. You will find th

will highlight a rectangular se

ure above! Then you can copy

I am sure you would know why you wanted to do that! This tip is incredibly useful though - yet another Word Tip from Word Tips World, designed to get you up there with the pros! Be sure to let us know if you found this tip useful, and what you used it for!

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

This doesn't work

Anonymous said...

this activity doesn't work i tried it and NOTHING happen!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

markowe said...

Sorry to hear it - this applies to Word 2003, I have no idea if it works in 2007, but it should do.

Can't help you - this works in every version of Word I have tried. Perhaps your ALT key is broken?!

Unknown said...

t does work in 2003, but it 2007 it comes up with a research column on the left

markowe said...

Thanks for this - if you learn how to do it in Word 2007 let us know. Though this is one of the good reasons why many of us are sticking with 2003 - because it didn't really need "fixing"...

Magnus Johansson said...

I'm never commenting solutions which helps me. But I thought I needed to here.

Those lines has driven me crazy for quite a while. If you insert a line yourself, with "---", it will never go away. Unless you follow this solution.

Thanks!

Derek said...

Hi, The block text select feature does not work inside a table (referring to word 2007), but otherwise it works like a charm.

dezi said...

that's Microsoft ... always adding more "kitchen sink" features and breaking what already is useful ... techies doing UX (User eXperience)/ interface design

Anonymous said...

It is easy to highlight several words in several or multiple word files using commercial tools available on net

Examples
http://technocomsolutions.com/wordhighlighterhelp.htm

Anonymous said...

The command to select blocks of text is CTRL+SHIFT+F8

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