Selecting Non-Consecutive Pieces of Text in OpenOffice Writer

I'm on Bainbridge Island near Seattle this week, training teachers who are switching to OpenOffice.org. (Bill would have charged them many hundreds of thousands of dollars over the next few years to keep going with MS Office, so they decided to spend the money on things like teachers' salaries instead.)

The thing that seems to be a big hit is the ability to select non-consecutive pieces of text. I'm not sure if I've blogged on that before, so this seemed like a good time.

Say you've got this text here.

NOTICE FOR ALL NEW HIRES

Date:

Your date of hire must be April or earlier.

Paperwork:

Your paperwork must be in by May 15th.

Donuts:

Please pick up your donuts in the gym.

You want the text for the heading, plus Date, Paperwork, and Donuts to be bold. These are non-consecutive pieces of text.

You could select the first line, click Bold, select the next line, click Bold, and so on.

Or you could select everything that you want bold, and click Bold once!

Here's what you do.

1. Select the first piece of text that you want to select, just normally.

2. Hold down the Ctrl key.

3. Select each additional piece of text that you want to format.

4. Release the Ctrl key.

5. Click Bold, or select a different font, or whatever other formatting you want to do.

This is a much quicker way than applying the formatting to one piece of text at a time.

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Comments

[Richard]

I knew about the control key trick, but I didn't know it could be used in OpenOffice. Nice.