Have you ever had this experience? You need to highlight some text in Microsoft Word. So you click and drag and suddenly Word seems to lose its marbles and speed up the highlighting so much that you end up highlighting four pages of text, instead of the half page you intended.
(Been there; done that.)
However, there's an easy solution to this problem that many Word users don't know. You can use the F8 key to highlight text instead of the mouse. To highlight text, click or move the cursor so it is to the left of the first character of text you want to highlight. Now press the F8 function key at the top of the keyboard. Now you can just use your arrow keys to extend the selection.
Once you are in this "extend selection" mode, you can do some tricky things to tell Word where you want the highlighting to end. For example, if you type a character such as "s" for example, the selection automatically finds the next instance of the letter "s" and extends the highlighting to that point. Similarly, you can use Word's Search feature to find particular text. So if you know that the word "canine" is on page 2 somewhere, you can press F8 to put Word into extend selection mode, then press Ctrl+F and enter canine into the Find What box and click Find Next. The text is highlighted up to that point.
After you have the text highlighted, you remain in extend mode until you do something to the selection, such as cutting, copying, or formatting it in some way. To get out of extend selection mode, you just press the Esc key, which is normally located in the upper left-hand corner of your keyboard.
With a little practice, you'll find the F8 key can save you a lot of time. It's great when you need some extra control either for selecting really small or really large amounts of text in a document. So go forth and highlight!
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