Overcoming Automatic Word Selection

Word includes a feature designed to help you select text faster and easier. When you click and drag to select text, Word assumes that if you move the mouse beyond the beginning or end of the current word, you want to start selecting by words. How you turn this capability on and off has been discussed in other issues of WordTips.

Normally this editing feature is quite helpful, but at other times it may complicate exactly what you want to do. For instance, you may want to select the text from the middle to one word to the middle of another. Granted, you could turn off the automatic word selection feature, but that gets bothersome.

Fortunately, by using a little mouse know-how you can inform Word that you only want to select absolute text instead of entire words. As you are moving the mouse, take a look at the behavior of the selection. When the selection jumps out to include the portion of the word you did not want, back up a bit. This causes the selection to shrink to where your cursor is. This works whether you are selecting forwards or backwards in the text.

As an example, imagine you have a sentence "The underwater world is exciting," and want to change it to "The undersea habitat is inviting." You can try to select "water world is exc". If you start at "water", when you drag the selection across to "world" you find the selection increases to include "underwater world."

If you move your cursor backward in Word 97 to the start of "world," you'll notice that the selection shrinks back to "underwater" and you can move the mouse cursor forward to increase your selection letter by letter in the next word.

In later versions of Word the behavior is a bit different (and much more useful). If you move your cursor backward to the start of "world," the selection shrinks back to just "water." In other words, it includes only that part of the text you originally started to select. Now you can move your mouse cursor forward to select the rest of your text, as desired.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (51) applies to Microsoft Word 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003. You can find a version of this tip for the ribbon interface of Word (Word 2007 and later) here: Overcoming Automatic Word Selection.