Once you get good at selecting text, you’ll find all kinds of ways to make typing, selecting, and moving text easier. Here are a few tips and tricks to get you started:

§         If you have a block of text selected and you start typing, the selected text will be erased and your new text will replace it.

§         You can select a block of text and drag and drop it into anywhere in your document. (We’ll talk about this more in Section 2.)

§         You can select any level of text (letter, word, phrase, paragraph, page, a document, or parts thereof) and manipulate it. This means you can bold a single letter the same way you would an entire document.

§         You can double-click a word to select it. Triple-click to select the whole paragraph.

§         If you want to delete a portion of text, you can select it and hit either the Backspace or Delete keys on your keyboard rather than cutting it.

§         You can cut or copy a portion of text and then paste it in a separate document or word processing program (like Notepad or WordPad which come with Windows).

§         You can select different parts of text by selecting the first part, then holding the Ctrl key with your mouse and selecting another part.

§         You can select a large portion of text by selecting the first word, then holding the Shift key and then selecting the last word. (This sounds really abstract, but we’ll practice it in a moment.)

§         To deselect text, just click anywhere in your document.

§         Ctrl+Shift+Home selects from your cursor to beginning of doc; Ctrl+Shift+End selects from your cursor to end of doc.

§         You can use the Insert key on your keyboard to change how you type. By default, Word is set to insert text when you start typing. If you press the Insert key and then place your cursor in front of text and start typing, Word will overwrite that portion of text. Here’s an example:

In both places, we started typing after "This is my sample text." In the bottom sample, you can see how part of the last sentence (Right now I have Insert on) is overwritten.

If overtype is on, the OVR indicator in your status bar will be black.

If overtype is off, the OVR indicator in your status bar will be gray.