Tom’s Tuesday Tech Tip: How Selective Are You – About Your Text?

Vickie and I were flying home from New York City after Vickie’s appearance on Fox & Friends. As usual, we were crunching away against a deadline. Our keyboards were blazing, fingers were flying and when we got to the point where we wanted to start highlighting some text in the document we were editing, I reached for my mouse, then remembered “Tom, you’re on an airplane and your mouse is packed in baggage.” My fingers drifted towards my touchpad, then remembered “Tom, you disabled your touchpad so that you wouldn’t drop your thumbs on it and move the cursor while you’re typing.” Finally, I thought about using the keyboard’s pointing stick but, it’s a terrible mouse alternative and tends to hop around when I use it so I dropped that idea.

As I was contemplating my next move, Vickie came to my rescue – she reached over, moved my cursor to the start of my text and told me to hold down the Shift key and then hit the right or down arrow and watch it select text. Amazing! It selected all the text I wanted and when I was done, I left-clicked the yellow highlighter and I was done ahead of the deadline.

My takeaway: if you want a quick, non-mouse way to select text for highlighting, cutting or copying, simply start with your cursor at the front or back of the text you want to select, hold down your Shift key and then arrow up, down or sideways until the text is selected. Then you can copy, cut, italicize or do whatever else you need.

Keep on techin’,