Word is now in Highlighting mode. Drag the mouse over the text you want to highlight. The text becomes highlighted — just as if you used a highlighter on regular paper but far neater. Click the Text Highlight button again to return the mouse to normal operation. Or press the Esc key to exit Highlighting mode.
| Click here to return to the 'Select text word-by-word' hint |
- Word for Office 365 Word for Office 365 for Mac Word 2019 Word 2019 for Mac Word 2016 Word 2013 Word 2010 Word 2007 Word 2016 for Mac More. Less Word contains many highlighters to make your text pop off the screen just as if you were highlighting paper with a fluorescent marker.
- Many Mac users probably don't think twice about the color that shows up when they select and highlight text or some app elements in OS X, which defaults to being blue.
Geez, this behavior goes back to System 4, maybe further. Not sure how far back but way far.
... and if you triple click, hold and drag you can select text paragraph by paragraph.
It's original. From the days of the 128k Mac (with no hard drive, just one 400k floppy drive which held system, app, and data!).
I think its easier to double-click the word, and then simply shift-click the final contiguous word you want in your selection. Accomplishes the same thing with less mousing.
As noted, this is definitely an old-school trick, but it's still really handy! It works in Windows too. Dragging is also a cool part of it, as is triple-click with dragging.
I use this click-&-½ technique every day, and have done so for at least 15 years. It's particularly elegant with my trackball, where my left button does a normal click and my right button locks the mouse button down. So I can left-click + right-click on a word, then roll the trackball to the end of the selection and right-click again to release.
I remember when Shift-click used to extend the selection to exactly the cursor position, whether you had started selecting with a double-click or not. But the newer and more useful double-click + Shift-click behavior is at least as old as OS X itself; maybe it wasn't standard across different text engines until more recently.
One difference from Word on Windows: the default mode there is that merely dragging across text, once you cross a word boundary, always starts selecting whole words. This is interesting but not always useful, so I'm glad Apple hasn't gone that far.
I am ashamed to admit this but I have been a Mac user since the beginning (and I used an Apple IIe before that) and I... DID NOT KNOW THIS. UGH! I am stunned that my ignorance of this was so persistent.
The only reason I am exposing my shame like this is that, just when you think you know it all (I program in PHP, am proficient with MySQL, can stumble through BASH, can get around in Applescript, am and have always been the 'Mac Guy' wherever I live/work and host my own server) along comes a low hanging fruit that you somehow, impossibly, have repeatedly overlooked for years. This reminds me to keep my eyes, ears and brain open even when I have 'mastered' the subject.
It's worked for me (in most apps) for as long as I can remember (back to 1986). Unfortunately, it doesn't work (for me) in Firefox.
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Father of Jeremy Logan
That's because FireFox is not a Mac application. It tries, and mostly fails.
Oddly enough, it doesn't work in Camino either, which is further along in being a Mac application.
---
-Robert Guico
Well, face it, web browsers have pretty much broken every user interface guideline that Apple has ever published. At least some sanity is returning with Safari, but the very nature HTML combined with the monkeys that write it has pretty much hosed decent web page GUIs forever. (Example: Selecting a menu item loads a new page.)
In Quark, and other page layout programs, a triple click will select the entire line, clicking 4 times will select the entire paragraph, and clicking 5 times will select all the text in the box.
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Seamus
| Click here to return to the 'Select text word-by-word' hint |
- Word for Office 365 Word for Office 365 for Mac Word 2019 Word 2019 for Mac Word 2016 Word 2013 Word 2010 Word 2007 Word 2016 for Mac More. Less Word contains many highlighters to make your text pop off the screen just as if you were highlighting paper with a fluorescent marker.
- Many Mac users probably don't think twice about the color that shows up when they select and highlight text or some app elements in OS X, which defaults to being blue.
Geez, this behavior goes back to System 4, maybe further. Not sure how far back but way far.
... and if you triple click, hold and drag you can select text paragraph by paragraph.
It's original. From the days of the 128k Mac (with no hard drive, just one 400k floppy drive which held system, app, and data!).
I think its easier to double-click the word, and then simply shift-click the final contiguous word you want in your selection. Accomplishes the same thing with less mousing.
As noted, this is definitely an old-school trick, but it's still really handy! It works in Windows too. Dragging is also a cool part of it, as is triple-click with dragging.
I use this click-&-½ technique every day, and have done so for at least 15 years. It's particularly elegant with my trackball, where my left button does a normal click and my right button locks the mouse button down. So I can left-click + right-click on a word, then roll the trackball to the end of the selection and right-click again to release.
I remember when Shift-click used to extend the selection to exactly the cursor position, whether you had started selecting with a double-click or not. But the newer and more useful double-click + Shift-click behavior is at least as old as OS X itself; maybe it wasn't standard across different text engines until more recently.
One difference from Word on Windows: the default mode there is that merely dragging across text, once you cross a word boundary, always starts selecting whole words. This is interesting but not always useful, so I'm glad Apple hasn't gone that far.
I am ashamed to admit this but I have been a Mac user since the beginning (and I used an Apple IIe before that) and I... DID NOT KNOW THIS. UGH! I am stunned that my ignorance of this was so persistent.
The only reason I am exposing my shame like this is that, just when you think you know it all (I program in PHP, am proficient with MySQL, can stumble through BASH, can get around in Applescript, am and have always been the 'Mac Guy' wherever I live/work and host my own server) along comes a low hanging fruit that you somehow, impossibly, have repeatedly overlooked for years. This reminds me to keep my eyes, ears and brain open even when I have 'mastered' the subject.
It's worked for me (in most apps) for as long as I can remember (back to 1986). Unfortunately, it doesn't work (for me) in Firefox.
---
Father of Jeremy Logan
That's because FireFox is not a Mac application. It tries, and mostly fails.
Oddly enough, it doesn't work in Camino either, which is further along in being a Mac application.
---
-Robert Guico
Well, face it, web browsers have pretty much broken every user interface guideline that Apple has ever published. At least some sanity is returning with Safari, but the very nature HTML combined with the monkeys that write it has pretty much hosed decent web page GUIs forever. (Example: Selecting a menu item loads a new page.)
In Quark, and other page layout programs, a triple click will select the entire line, clicking 4 times will select the entire paragraph, and clicking 5 times will select all the text in the box.
---
Seamus
I do the double-click, drag thing all the time.
For the record, you can usually move the cursor by words with the keyboard by pressing the left or right arrows with the option key down. Shift-option extends the selection by words.
Actually, in MS Word (if you disabled the automatic word selection), double-clicking selects a word and dragging only selects characters.
How To Highlight Text In Word 2008 For Mac
This behavior does not exist in Firefox or in Thunderbird. Does anyone know 1) why? and 2) how to make it work with those two apps? Does Mozilla use it's own text editor? Can I tell those apps to use the native text editor?
