Once you have started creating document text, there will be times when you need to make changes to the text in chunks rather than a word at a time. To achieve this you will need to select the text to change, and as with a lot of features in Microsoft Word 2010 there are multiple ways to achieve this.
Selecting text with the mouse
This is the most common method of selecting text, and is the probably the one you’ll use most.
- Use your mouse to position the cursor at the start (or end) of the block of text you want to select.
- Click and hold the left mouse button.
- Whilst holding the mouse button, drag the cursor down (or up if you started at the end) the text to select it.
If you want to select a single word, simply double click it.
Selecting a text block with the mouse
You will commonly want to select entire blocks of text, such as paragraphs etc in one go without having to drag the mouse all over the document.
- Click at the beginning of the text block to plant the cursor.
- Press and hold down the ‘Shift’ key
- Use the cursor and click at the end of the block you want to select, all text between your two click points will now be selected.
- If you want to select just a single sentence, place the cursor over the sentence and press the Ctrl key and click the sentence.
Selecting text with the keyboard
Whilst selecting text with a mouse works fine for most people, regular ‘Powerusers’ don’t want to take their hands off the keyboard, so along with the various shortcut keys built into Word 2010 Microsoft have included the ability to select text using the cursor keys – while this isn’t quite as flexible as using the mouse, it is certainly quicker than the mouse for some functions.
- To select a block of two or more characters use the arrow keys to move the cursor to the start (or end) of the block of text you want to select. Press the ‘Shift’ key and use the arrow keys to move the cursor around the document and select your text.
- To select text a whole word at a time, do the same as above, but hold down both the ‘Ctrl’ and ‘Shift’ keys together to select a word at a time.
- To select test from the current cursor point to the start of a line press ‘Shift’ and ‘Home’ on the keyboard, similarly pressing ‘Shift’ and ‘End’ will select text to the end of the line.
https://www.chimpytech.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=2219&action=edit&message=1#wpseo_linkdex
Selecting non-continuous blocks of text
Sometimes you will want to make changes such as formatting to multiple blocks of text, but they’re not all in a block together and have gaps or other text etc between them, fortunately it’s easy to select non-continuous blocks of text to cut down on repeating multiple formatting commands etc.
- Click to position the cursor at the start of your first block of text.
- Click and drag with with mouse to select the first block of text.
- Press and hold the ‘Ctrl’ key, and repeat steps 1 and 2 to select your next block.
- Now repeat step 3 and then steps 1 and 2 to select more blocks of text.
