Working with Paragraphs

Making line-by-line corrections may be the biggest part of your editing task, but you ll also be moving paragraphs around if you need to restructure documents or reorganize sections. The first step in working with paragraphs involves marking that paragraph (or section) as a block. Table 4-3 provides block selection methods .

Lingo  

A block of text is any text (including a character, a word, a line, a paragraph, a section, or an entire document) that you highlight.

Table 4-3: Selecting Text Blocks

Action	Description
Double-click	Selects the word at the cursor position
Ctrl+click	Selects a sentence
Triple-click	Selects the current paragraph
Double-click in the left margin	Selects the paragraph at the cursor position
Click, drag, and release	Selects a phrase
Ctrl+Shift+Home	Selects all text from the cursor position to the beginning of the document
Ctrl+Shift+End	Selects all text from the cursor position to the end of the document
Ctrl+A	Selects the entire document

Aha! ”Selecting Multiple Paragraphs

You can select multiple blocks of text in different parts of the document (called noncontiguous blocks because they are not positioned next to each other). You might do this, for example, when you want to change the format of several headings in your document. You could select the first heading normally (triple-click the text to select it); then press and hold Ctrl. Scroll to the next heading and triple-click it; this text is selected too. Finally, still holding Ctrl, scroll to the additional headings and select them. Once the text blocks are selected, you can make whatever changes you were going to make and the edits are applied to all the selected blocks.

 

Once you select the text you want to work with, you need to specify what you want to do with it. Some of the more common block edits involve copying, pasting, moving, or deleting text. Here are the fastest ways to get the jobs done:

• To cut selected text, click Cut on the Standard toolbar or press Ctrl+X.

• To copy selected text, click Copy on the Standard toolbar or press Ctrl+C.

• To paste selected text into the document, position the cursor where you want to paste the text and click Paste on the Standard toolbar or press Ctrl+V.

• (If you accidentally paste text in the wrong place, simply press Ctrl+Z to undo the change.)

• To delete selected text, press Delete.

Aha! ”Display Clipboard Contents

Remember that you can also display and work with the contents of the Office Clipboard by choosing Office Clipboard from the Edit menu.

 

Understanding Paste Special

Word also enables you to do a special kind of paste with some items you ll paste from the Office Clipboard. Choose the Paste Special command from the Edit menu when you are adding information such as text, graphics, a chart, or an HTML document and you want to preserve the format of file from which you originally copied the data. In the Paste Special dialog box, you can choose whether you want to embed the file or create a link that allows users to move to the application that created it.