Select that part of the text and copy-paste it to me.

How many times have you heard yourself make this request? And how many times have you said to yourself: now how do I select the text? Selecting text is a simpler operation than you think, and now I'll explain how to do it.

Selecting text can be useful in various occasions: applying a style, deleting a portion of a document, moving text, copying a sentence, copy-pasting a chain letter that appears on Facebook, etc.. Um... ok, delete the last example, it's not advisable to put it in place. :)

If you use a Word processor knowing and being able to select text is a must. Selection can be done either with the Mouse or with the keyboard. Both of these devices allow you to select characters, words, paragraphs, the whole document... Using the Mouse sometimes results in slightly faster operations, but on many other occasions the use of the keyboard allows you precision and speed.

Selecting with the Mouse is quite simple: bring the pointer to the first character you want to select, press the left button, leave it pressed and drag the pointer to the last character you want to select. Release the left button and you have selected a portion of text. That was longer said than done. You've noticed that now the selected portion is highlighted with a color change, usually the text undergoes a color inversion. Try it now, the selection also works with this item. Bring the pointer to a character and select a part of the text.

When a text is selected pay attention to the keys you press, because the text becomes very sensitive and susceptible to changes. For example, if you have selected a portion of text, pressing any letter on the keyboard will replace the selected text with the letter you typed.

Within a word processing program - do you use Biblos? - you can use the above selection technique, but if you just need to select a word, just bring the pointer to it and quickly double-click.

Selecting using the keyboard is also easy. The beginning of the selection is always given by the position of the cursor. So bring the cursor to the first character of the selection and... Here are various key combinations, depending on the type of selection you want to make. I list them:

• Shift+Horizontal Arrows: by holding down the Shift key and using the Right and Left directional arrows, you can select individual characters, going forward or backward
• Shift+Down Arrow: Select to the end of the line. If you leave the Shift key pressed and press the arrow again, you will continue to select subsequent lines;
• Shift+Up Arrow: Select from the cursor to the beginning of the line. Continuing will select previous lines;
• Ctrl+Shift+HorizontalArrows: Instead of characters you select words;
• Ctrl+Shift+Vertical Arrows: Instead of lines, you select paragraphs
• Shift+Home: you select up to the beginning of the line;
• Shift+End: you select until the end of the line;
• Ctrl+Shift+Home: You select up to the beginning of document;
• Ctrl+Shift+End: Select until end of document.

This list is not exhaustive, but I think it will do for now. In general, the rule is: all the cursor movement keys, if used together with the Shift key, select the part of the text the cursor is moving over.

For selecting the entire document, some word processors use the Ctrl+A combination, while others, like Biblos, use the Ctrl+5 combination on the keyboard. Using Biblos you can customize the key combinations and choose the one you want.

Using the Mouse or the keyboard, when you need to select a large portion of text, is not exactly the smoothest way to do it. The selection method I am going to explain is only available if you use Biblos.

To the F8 key Biblos assigns a very important functionality: the guided selection of a text. The F8 key has a double functionality of text marking. For example:

• Place the cursor on the first character to be selected
• Press F8, and you have marked the beginning of the selection
• Walk freely through the document until you reach the last character to select
• Press F8 again and the text will be selected, from the first character to the last

And now that I know how to do that, what do I do with the selected text? Well, that depends on you.

Well, that's up to you: you can delete it, by pressing the Del key; you can change the font style; you can copy the text to the clipboard, by pressing Ctrl+C; you can cut the text with Ctrl+X and re-paste it elsewhere using Ctrl+V etc... But these operations I think can be addressed in another article, how about it?

Now it's your turn, practice all the operations you need to master text selection. In the video I show what I just described.

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