I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been writing something or working on a project in Microsoft Word and it would have been helpful to be able to select text vertically. It never occurred to me that it was even possible to do such a thing! To my surprise, I learned that in fact you can select text vertically in Microsoft Word, thanks to an article over at the How-To Geek site.
All you have to do to select text vertically is hold down the Alt key and then you’ll be able to make your selection. Not only is this great for deleting, copying, or cutting words, but it’ll also be helpful for formatting changes like making the first word of each sentence bold, increasing the size of the text, or whatever the case may be. Below you can see how I held down the Alt key and then highlighted the first word in each line:
All it took was one click, and I was able to make the first word of each line bold as shown below:
Of course this isn’t something that you’re going to use everyday, but when the occasion arises where it would be time-saving to highlight text-vertically, you’ll appreciate this helpful tip.
Source:
This isn’t limited to MS Word. Since I found out about it last March (thanks to Lifehacker), I’ve been using it with SAS statistical software to get columns of results into Excel.
It also works in Notepad++ and other reputable text editors, but not in plain old MS Notepad.
This is pretty crazy! I tried this in a few apps as Joe suggested, but I didn’t have much luck with some of them. I’ll definitely be using this though.