After all my preaching about using the keyboard more than the mouse in Microsoft Word, and I have to go and do this.
Still, these tidbits are nice to know when you're using the mouse. Plus it’s good to have the basics down before moving on to more and better things.
I’d be surprised if there’s not a tip or three you don’t know yet.
Thanks for your interest
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Lesser-known mouse selections
Using the margin
Click once (or drag)
Clicking once in the margin near text selects the current line at the cursor.
I use this a lot since you can also drag in the margin to select whole lines. It avoids having to select the exact right starting or ending character or word.
Double click
Double-clicking in the margin selects the whole paragraph.
Triple click
Triple clicking in the margin selects the whole document.
Click a sentence
Command (or Control in Windows) clicking anywhere within a sentence selects the whole sentence.
Similarly Command+Option on Mac (or Control+Alt on Windows) click a sentence selects up to the cursor position in the current sentence. Although if you accidentally start dragging when you click, it will start a special block selection.
Of course, it doesn’t play nice with creating non-contiguous selections since they both use the Command (or Control key in Windows) modifier keys.
Drag headings in the navigation pane (Windows only)
In Word for Windows, you can drag headings around in the navigation pane.
It's not perfect since it will sometimes improperly pick up the heading style in some cases, but it's still very useful. I find it handy for note documents, but I also use it in my novels since I outline in real time as I write (kind of a messy back and forth process for me).
I don’t know why this feature wasn't implemented in Word for Mac. You’ll have to use the inferior Outline View to move things around in a similar way. Annoying.
More common mouse tips
You may already know some or all of these, but I included them for completeness.
Double clicking a word
Double-click a word to select it. Option double click will select up to the cursor in a word.
I actually use this one a lot.
Triple clicking a paragraph
Triple-click inside a paragraph to select the entire paragraph.
Drag selections
You can drag selections with the mouse to a new location.
I actually find this annoying in Word for Mac because the display tries to visually represent the moved text as you mv the selection. In the process, it covers up where I’m dragging the text. I still use it though.
Non-contiguous selections
Hold Command on Mac or Control on Windows to select more text in Word even when the selections are not contiguous.
Then anything you do acts on each separate selection saving you some effort to reapply whatever action you’re doing to each block of text.
Block selections
Holding down Option on Mac or Alt on Windows “block selects” content making a connected series of non-contiguous selections in terms of text.
It’s a special case of non-contiguous selections that is quite useful when you need it. At first, I thought I’d never use this feature, but I encountered a situation editing timeline text on my YouTube channel where it was the perfect solution.
Holding down Command+Option (or Control+Alt on Windows) and dragging automatically creates the block selection starting from the beginning of the current sentence. It's probably a little too specialized for a tool that is already has specialized use cases.
All done
Using the keyboard is probably faster for most cases if you're making local changes to content, but the mouse is better for more random selections.
That's it.
Now go forth and edit faster!
Let me know what you think or if you have any interesting use cases.
