Home

Word 2010 Videos - Selecting Text

Before you edit of format text, you need to select it first, and there are several ways of selecting text in Word. The method you use will depend on the situation and also your preferences.

Let's start with the most commonly used way of selecting text. We click with the left mouse button at the start of the text we want to select, and then drag the mouse over the text to select it. There, that text is now selected and we can do anything we want with it. Let's bold it by clicking on the bold button. Here we selected just one word and the period, but if we want we can select multiple words too, simply by clicking and dragging over them.

You can also use your keyboard to select text. Place the cursor at the start of the text you want to select, and hold down shift as you press the right arrow key. Pressing the left arrow key removes letters from the selection.

Holding down ctrl and shift as you press the right arrow key, like so, will select whole words at a time. Following on from this, holding down ctrl and shift as you press the down arrow selects whole paragraphs at a time.

Let's go to a new starting position. Here we go. Holding down shift and pressing the end key on the keyboard selects from the cursor position to the end of the line. Similarly, holding down shift as we press the home key goes the other way; it selects from the cursor position to the start of the line.

Let's go to a new starting point - here. And you can probably guess what ctrl-shft-end is going to do. Let's do that now: ctrl-shift-end. That's right, that selects all the text from the cursor position to the end of the document. And ctrl-shift-home does the opposite: that goes from the cursor position right to the top of the document.

Here's everybody's favourite: ctrl-a selects everything in the document.

Next: Copying And Moving Text