Praxis

Volume 9   Issue 1  Feb. 2005

You don't often need to select a vertical block of text in Word--but when you do, you'll be frustrated if you don't know the trick. If you've ever opened a long document with unwanted periods or other characters at the beginning of each line, you know what I'm talking about. You could delete the undesired characters manually, line by line, but there is a much faster way: Hold down the Alt key while you click the far left side of the desired column's top line and drag down and to the right to extend the selection over the unwanted text. Once you've made your selection, you can send that text to perdition's flames by pressing the Delete key.

Word makes it easy to retrieve documents you've recently opened--just click File and choose a file name from the bottom of the drop-down menu. By default, the File menu offers you the four most recently opened documents.  But - you don't have to live with just four recently used files. You can choose any number up to nine. Here's how: Choose Tools, Options, and click the General tab. In the box to the right of 'Recently used files list,' type the number of files you'd like your File menu to display (or use the little arrows to increase or decrease the number). Click OK to lock in your choice. If you've increased the number, you'll need to open more than four files to notice the change.

If you don't want recently used files to appear on the File menu (some people do have secrets), uncheck 'Recently used files list' and click OK.

By the way, you can use the Windows Start menu to retrieve recently used files from any Windows application. Select Start, Documents (My Recent Documents in XP), then choose a file from the resulting list.