Discontinuous Selection

One of the handiest selection tools in Word is also one of the least used: the “discontinuous selection.” Suppose, for example, a paragraph contains five items that need to be formatted identically—e.g., case names—but that are not adjacent to each other.

One way of going about this is selecting each item and applying the appropriate formatting individually. But wouldn’t it be great if you could select all these words at one time and then apply the formatting to them in a single step?

You can. To do this, (1) select the first block of text, (2) holding down the Ctrl key, select the next block of text, (3) make additional selections, if necessary, by repeating step (2) and (4) apply formatting. (Make sure that the Ctrl button is not pressed down before you make your first selection. Otherwise, you will end up selecting the entire sentence.)

The trick also works for cutting and pasting, though there a couple of things to look out for. First, the order in which Word pastes the items depends on the order in which you selected them. So if you select “1,” then “3,” then “2,” Word will paste the items in that order, regardless of the order in which they appear in the document. Second, Word inserts a paragraph mark (hard return) between the items, which may or may not be desired.

Discontinuous selection is a great tool, which also works in other Office programs and many other Windows programs. It is so useful, and so easy, that you will kick yourself for not having discovered it earlier.