5 Best Selection techniques in Microsoft word

Selection techniques in Microsoft word

To carry a formatting task in any application software, especially Microsoft word, a character, word, sentence, and paragraph must be first highlighted before we can format it. Formatting, in this case, means changing the font style, font size, colour, bold, italic, underline, text alignment, etc.

Microsoft word, being a word processor application software, has many techniques of these categories of text I have just mentioned. In this tutorial, I am going to show you how to use the selection methods listed below:

Selection techniques

1. Selection bar
2. Dragging over text
3. Double-clicking
4. Triple-clicking
5. Control + A

Selection bar

The selection bar allows you to select a line of the paragraph- a single line of text as can be seen in the image below. By moving the mouse cursor along the left edge of a word document window, the cursor automatically changes to an arrow. The point where the change occurs is called the selection bar. At this point, you noticed the arrow pointer; you can click the left mouse button once to select a single line of text.

selection bar

Dragging over text

By moving the mouse to the beginning of a text, word or sentence to be selected and drag the mouse across it to the last word. The text will be selected.

Double-clicking

Whenever you double click on a word, the word you click will be selected. From this statement, it means to select a word you double- click on it.

Microsoft-Word-Dragging-Selection.

Triple-clicking

While double-clicking will select a sentence, the paragraph is selected by clicking on it three times. If, for example, there are many paragraphs in a word document. You can select a particular paragraph by just moving the mouse to the middle of it and click on it three times.

Selecting paragraph-Microsoft word.

Control + A(ctrl+A)

The shortcut key ctrl+A can be used to select the whole Microsoft word document. This key combination is handy if you want to format everything you have typed at once. For example, in a sixty-page document. It is required to change the font size to 12, by just pressing ctrl+A all the text in the document will be selected. The next thing to do is to change the size by clicking on the appropriate font size.

Conclusion

With these five selection techniques, you will be able to select a character, a word, a sentence, and a paragraph. Selection bar to the rescue when selecting a sing line of text. Double-click selects a word in a paragraph and triple-click selects a paragraph.

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