Selecting Words in Text Efficiently, or How to Save Two Days of Work Each Year.
Computer Type: All • Difficulty Level: Novice
Computer users are constantly typing, deleting, changing, and moving words. And one of the more common tasks we do while working with words is selecting words in order to move them somewhere or delete them. Everyone knows how to select a word on a computer. However, many people don’t realize that there may be a faster and more efficient method than the one they currently use. Today, we’ll talk about a better way to select words.
In training sessions, I’ll often watch people select a word by care
fully placing their cursor at the beginning of a word, then dragging their mouse over the word, then slowly bringing it to a stop at the end of a word or words.
However, you can also select a word in text by simply positioning your cursor anywhere over the word and double-clicking. And this trick will work in almost all programs. Open up a word-processing program and give it a try. See? In Microsoft Word, when you select a word this way, it also picks up the space at the end of the word, which is usually helpful. Selecting words this way is faster and more efficient.
Well, you might say, that’s great, but often I want to select a series of words in a row. In that case, simply double-click anywhere on the first word, keep your mouse button held down, and drag across the line to the last word you want to select. In word-processing programs, selecting words this way
picks up series of words, and will select from the beginning of the first word to the end of the last word in the series. You don’t have to fiddle with positioning your cursor exactly over the end of the last word.
If this multiple-word selection trick didn’t work for you when you tried it, chances are you released the mouse button after double-clicking on the word, then re-clicked on the word. When you want to select a series of words, don’t release the mouse button after you double-click on the first one: double-click, hold, drag.
What’s the value of a trick like this? Well, I ran a quick test. First, I timed myself selecting ten words in a Word document by positioning my cursor at the beginning of a word, then dragging carefully to the end of each word. It took me 37 seconds to select the ten individual words. Then I selected the same ten words by double-clicking on them. It took me 12 seconds to get all ten individual words. In short, it was 2.5 seconds faster per word to use the double-click method.
If you work with text a lot, you might be selecting words in this way this 100 times a day or more. Using the faster method will save you about 4 minutes/day. That’s not much, but over the course of a year it adds up to almost 17 hours. Even subtracting the time it took you to read this article, that’s more than two full workdays!
Happy clicking, and enjoy all your newfound free time!
