Tame the runaway mouse in your house!
Mar 28 '01
The Bottom Line Your computing experience will be much more satisfying if you know these basic tips on selecting small to large blocks of text with your mouse.
Your boss is a slave driver, right? She’s had you up late every night for a week piecing together this detailed report for the Board of Director’s explaining why the company needs to install the latest revolutionary, contoured toilet seats in every ladies room in the corporate headquarters. Of course, this rationale takes a lot of explaining, so your report is massive.
Working on your king-sized baby in Microsoft Word is OK, but navigating throughout all 1,271 pages making all of the necessary changes is real...oh, you know...tedious.
You have a lot of text blocks to move here and there, boss’s prerogative, you know. And as you maneuver around trying to select all the right stuff, your runaway mouse is really starting to get to you. You know the mouse I’m talking about. The one that jumps ahead about 20 pages when you’ve just about got those two paragraphs selected that you really wanted to move in the first place. Ugh! Don’t you just hate that?
Then when you decide you’ll just backtrack, you slowly start moving back the other way, and when you’re just about where you want to be...suddenly you are 6 pages back the other way. Ay Caramba! You just wanna kill that stupid mouse of yours, don’t you?
OK, take a deep breath and listen. Here are some tricks that will help you tame that little critter once and for all. And after you practice these ideas, selecting text will be a breeze, no matter how much is involved. These tricks work for most versions of Microsoft Word and may work for some other programs as well.
Double-click any word in your document. This will select that entire word if you so choose.
Triple-click any word in your document. This will select the entire paragraph in which that word resides.
Place your cursor in the left-hand margin, then click and drag. The cursor will look like an arrow when in the margin area. This is another way to select whole lines of text and move up or down your document to select large blocks of text.
Click a cursor at the beginning of your selection and Shift-click at the end of your selection. Holding down the Shift key when you click the second time will select all text between those two points.
Shift-Ctrl-(End or Home) Click the cursor at the beginning of your selection, and then push the key combination of Shift-Ctrl-End to select from that point to the end of your document. Push Shift-Ctrl-Home to select from there to the beginning of your document.
Perhaps the best mouse tool available for selecting text is the famous “wheel-mouse”. By clicking at your starting point and holding your left mouse button while you rotate the mouse wheel, you have very fine control of your cursor motion as you wheel up or down the page. Try it! It’s fun!
Is this stuff easy or what? Using these tricks makes selecting large amounts of text a snap. You can’t necessarily throw the darned thing away, but you can at least tame that mousy beast. Now take this chair and this whip and go in there and show that darned mouse who's boss around your house.
That's my Epinion! Mahalo for stopping by!
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Epinions.com ID:
Schinjay
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Member: Steve Schindler
Location: San Antonio, Texas
Reviews written: 37
Trusted by: 57 members
About Me:
Steve Schindler writes his informative and humorous "Schindler's Cyber List" for epinions.com.
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