This is a very small post. But very useful in specific scenarios.
Consider this text in a Word document.
Unfortunately, the bullets are NOT bullets. These are manually typed characters.
Suppose you want to remove all these numbers… you have no choice but to delete them one by one. That is inefficient.
Here is a nice and effective way…
Press ALT key and then select the numbers… as shown below. Now, miraculously, Word allows selection vertically.
Now you can Delete or Cut (Ctrl X) to get rid of these numbers.
Needless to say, this works for selecting columns in a multi-column document as well.
Unfortunately, after pasting it, it will put a new paragraph mark after every line.
Another useful scenario – chat copy paste
I copy pasted some chat text from Skype into a mail message.
Now with vertical selection, you can easily remove the header which accompanies each sentence. Of course, long sentences will wrap. Even then, it is a useful feature to clean up such chat transcript.
Another approach is to use wildcard Find Replace in Word.
Refer to this article for details: WhatsApp Chat Analysis using Microsoft Word – Part 2
What next?
While writing this article, I realized that selection of various areas of documents is a common activity… in the upcoming articles I will discuss this in more detail.
