Extending a Selection

In our last newsletter, I promised to tell you about Word's Extend Selection feature, which I've assigned to the Insert key in our Editor's ToolKit program. Extend Selection, a terrific tool, is often overlooked because it's not included on a menu or a toolbar. It's also not covered well in Word's documentation (so what else is new?). Nevertheless, if you're editing in Microsoft Word, you'll find this feature invaluable.

Here's how it works: You're editing along and decide to delete the rest of the sentence. You could do it this way:

1. Hold down SHIFT.

2. Use your cursor key to move and move and move and move to the end of the sentence.

3. Press DELETE.

Or, you could do it this way:

1. Press F8 to turn on Extend Selection (or double-click the EXT box in the status bar at the bottom of your Word window).

2. Press the period key (.) to instantly select to the end of the sentence.

3. Press DELETE.

The second way is much faster, and when deadlines are looming, fast is good.

Extend Selection automatically selects to any character you type. If you hit the spacebar, it moves to the next space (probably selecting a word). Hit it again to extend to the space after that. Neat! Hit ENTER to extend to the end of the paragraph. Hit a character key to move to the next occurrence of a specific character. Use Word's Find feature to extend the selection to something far, far away. Once you've got that text selected, you can cut it, copy it, italicize it, style it, change its case, type over the top of it, or do almost anything else to it. You can even stick it on the Spike--but we'll talk about that in our next issue.

In the meantime, you should know that hitting F8 several times in succession selects text all by itself. Here's the pattern:

Hit F8 once to turn on Extend Selection.

Hit it again to select the current word.

Hit it again to select the current sentence.

Hit it again to select the current paragraph.

Hit it again to select the whole document. Now that's a selection!

If you change your mind, you can cancel the selection by hitting ESCAPE and then pressing a cursor key.

The next time you need to select some text, don't reach for the SHIFT key. Instead, try Extend Selection.