Highlight Half of a Paragraph? You Can in Microsoft Word!

In most word processing applications, highlighting is limited to lines of texts – meaning when you select text going down that the rest of the line of text will be highlighted with it. Of course, 99.9% of the time that’s exactly what you need. In fact, I can’t even imagine a situation where you would find it absolutely necessary to highlight the left or right half of a paragraph. But you can! Just hold down the ALT key and then click & drag a box in your paragraph and you’ll get something that looks like this:

 

 

Now that you’ve learned this cool new trick, you’re probably wondering what in the world would you use it for. There’s only one scenario that I know of where it’d be practical, and that’s when you create a list using tabs. For example, if you create a tabbed list that produces 4 columns of text and you want to make each column a different color or you want to bold the 3rd column, without ALT click & drag you’d have to format these one by one. But now you can do this:

 

 

That being said, I have never had to use this personally; simply because I don’t use tabbed lists. And though it’s a lot better than using the spacebar to line up text (and if you are guilty of this, please read this post), I will always use tables for generating lists. Using tables not overcome the obstacle of formatting a column of text, they are much easier to manipulate and have more options to make them look better.

 

That also being said, it’s still a cool trick! And who knows, maybe one day I’ll find another practical reason to use. If so, I’ll let you know as soon as possible.