Before you can format or edit your text, you need to highlight it. Highlighting your text is a way of telling Microsoft Word that you plan to work with a certain piece of text. (Highlighting is also known as selecting.) The easiest way of selecting text is to position the cursor where you want your selection to start, click and hold the mouse button down and drag to the position where you want to end the selection. It is not necessary to drag across every single line that you want to select. It is sufficient to move in a straight line from start to the finish. To deselect your text and remove the highlight, click anywhere in your text. The flashing cursor will then reappear. Another easy way of highlighting text is to select the whole document. This is done using the "Select All" command. In Microsoft Word 2007, the "Select All" command can be found in the "Editing" group of the "Home" Tab. Click to display the "Select" drop-down menu then choose "Select All". The "Select All" command is found in many programs and many environments. It can also be accessed from the keyboard using Control-A: just hold down the Control key while typing "A". As well as selecting characters by dragging across them, Word also allows you to select whole lines. To do this, place the cursor in the left margin and you'll notice that it changes to an arrow pointing to the right. Once the cursor changes, you can simply click once to select a single line or click and drag to select multiple lines. Another way of highlighting text is to click multiple times. To highlight a word, double click on the word; to highlight an entire paragraph, click three times on the paragraph. It is also possible to select text using the keyboard. Most of these options involve using the Shift key. One such technique is click followed by Shift-click. First, click to mark the start of the area that needs to be highlighted; next hold down the Shift key and click to position the cursor at the point where you want the highlighting to end. All the text between the two clicks will then be highlighted. To select text without the mouse, use the arrow keys on your keyboard to move the cursor to the point where you want your selection. Next, press the Shift key together with one of the arrow keys. To select character by character, use the right or left arrow depending on the direction in which you want to move. To select line by line press the down or up arrow. The Shift key can also be used together with the Control key. For example, if you hold down Control and Shift then press the right arrow, you will highlight word by word instead of character by character. Similarly, if you hold down Control and Shift and press the down cursor key, you will highlight paragraph by paragraph. The Home and End keys can also be used in this context. For example, if the cursor is positioned in the middle of a line, pressing Shift and Home will select from that position to the start of the line while pressing Shift and End will select from the cursor position to the end of the line. Holding down Control and Shift and pressing the right arrow will select from the cursor position to the start of the document. Control, Shift and End will select from the cursor position to the end of the document.
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