Selecting Text: Part 2

Using your mouse

How to select text with your mouse is an important thing to know, especially in cases like a webpage where we can't select text with our keyboards.

There are three main ways that you can select text with a mouse: multi-clicking, click-and-dragging, and shift-clicking.

Multi-Clicking

You can use double-, triple-, and even quadruple-clicks to select text. This trick works in areas where you can type (like this one) and anywhere you can select text (e.g. PDFs, webpages). Double-clicking selects a single word or figure. If you double-click the word 'select', it's selected! To select a whole paragraph, do a triple-click. If you triple-click anywhere in this paragraph, the whole thing should be selected. If you use OpenOffice, multi-click selection works slightly differently. In OpenOffice, a triple-click selects a sentence and a quadruple-click selects a paragraph.

Click-and-Dragging

Sometimes, we want to select more than a word but not a single paragraph. Clicking and dragging gives us the freedom of selecting however much text we want. How does it work? You probably already know this: you click where you want to start selecting text, hold the click, move the cursor to where you want to stop selecting text, and release the click. Click-and dragging is very easy to do, and it is likely the most widely-used way to select text. It is extremely useful for selecting text in places you can't type, but keep the keyboard methods in mind!

Shift-Clicking

Shift-clicking works a lot like clicking and dragging, and it comes in handy to select only the characters you want. A Shift-click will select the text from your text cursor to your mouse click. Give it a try. This comes in handy if you have to scroll while selecting text or if you don't like holding down your mouse or trackpad button while selecting.

Now that you know all kinds of ways to select text, Part 3 of this tutorial will teach you some ways that you can deselect it, just in case you got excited and selected a bit too much.

Part 3: Deselecting Text >>