Selecting and navigating text

Hello students, welcome to Kwickprep. A fast data entry operator rarely drags the mouse across a long page. So how do they move and select text so quickly? Today we will learn to navigate and select text with the mouse and the keyboard.

First, two key words. Navigating means moving the cursor through a document, to the place where you want to work. Selecting means highlighting text, so that the next command acts on it. You must select text before you can cut it, copy it or make it bold.

Here are the most useful moving keys. The arrow keys move the cursor one letter left or right, or one line up or down. Ctrl with the left or right arrow jumps one whole word. Home and End take you to the start and end of the current line. Ctrl+Home and Ctrl+End jump to the very start and end of the document. Page Up and Page Down move up or down one screen.

You can also move with the mouse. Click anywhere in the text to place the cursor there. The scroll wheel or the scroll bar moves the view up and down the page. Remember, scrolling only changes what you see, and the cursor stays where it was until you click.

Long documents need faster jumps. In Word, Ctrl+G or F5 opens Go To, where you type a page number like twelve and press Enter. Find, with Ctrl+F, jumps straight to a word you type.

Now, selecting with the mouse. Drag with the left button held down to select any amount of text. Double-click a word to select that word. In Word, triple-click inside a paragraph to select the whole paragraph. Hold Ctrl and click inside a sentence to select that sentence in Word.

The Shift key turns every moving key into a selecting key. Shift with an arrow selects one letter or one line, growing each time you press. Ctrl+Shift with the left or right arrow selects a word at a time. Shift+Home or Shift+End selects from the cursor to the start or end of the line. Ctrl+A selects the whole document.

Here is a great trick for long text that is hard to drag. First, click at the start of the text you want. Then scroll to the end, hold Shift and click there. Everything between the two clicks is selected, without any dragging.

Let us test this. The cursor is at the start of a line. You press Shift+End, and then you press Delete. Pause and think, what happens? The whole line is selected and deleted, from the cursor to the end of the line.

One warning about selected text. If you type any key while text is selected, your typing replaces all of it. To remove the highlight, click anywhere or press an arrow key. If you replace something by mistake, press Ctrl+Z to undo it.

Let us recap. Navigate with the arrows, Ctrl with the arrows for words, and Home and End for lines. Ctrl+Home and Ctrl+End jump to the start and end of the document. Select a word with a double-click, any text by dragging, or with Shift and the arrows. Ctrl+A selects everything, and remember that typing replaces what is selected.