There are lots of weird things you can do in Word. Now that I’m revising my Word for Dummies book for the Office 2010 version of Word, I’ve once again stumbled upon some of the more oddball aspects of the programs, stuff I’d write about if I had the room in the book, but stuff that’s otherwise not really that important. No, it’s just weird.
Take for example the ability of Word to select disparate chunks of a document. Lookee here:
To select separate, non-contiguous blocks of text, as shown above, simply press and hold the Ctrl key while you select. You must use the mouse to select the text, the methods of which are cheerfully described in my book Word For Dummies.
I’ve no idea why you’d want to select chunks of text like that.
You could format all those chunks at once, that might be handy.
Perhaps you want to copy all those separate chunks. That works, but they all paste in a a single block. What’s the point in that?
Honestly, chunk-selecting is just one of those odd things that Word does. If you can divine a reason for marking blocks that way, or perhaps you do it yourself and can’t think of ever not using the technique, please do let me know.
I’ve used it in the past for mass (un)bolding and the like, or for mass deletion. But I use it sparingly.
Comment by Douglas — November 13, 2009 @ 2:18 am
I’ve used it in Excel for the same reason, but I’ve really never done it in Word.
Comment by admin — November 13, 2009 @ 7:08 am
This is something I’ve used before in Word. I just figured it might work in the same way that selecting multiple non-contiguous files in explorer works. And it does. It’s handy for formatting, but I haven’t really thought of any other reasons for doing so.
Comment by Mel — November 16, 2009 @ 11:02 am