Making Life Much Easier in OpenOffice Writer by Selecting Non-Consecutive Pieces of Text

I've mentioned this in the context of various articles before but I don't think I've really zeroed in on it before.

Selecting text and formatting it, whether manually or with styles, is one of the standard tasks you do every day. Let's say you've got a few notes, interspersed in your document, that need to be bold. They're not consecutive so you select one, then apply formatting; select the next then apply the formatting again and so on.

Select, apply; select, apply. It's one of each.

Or IS it???

You can select a bunch of pieces of text that aren't next to each other, and then apply whatever formatting you like. (Or delete all the pieces of text, or do anything.)

So:

1. Select the first piece of text.  (If you're applying a paragraph or list style, you just need to select a part of the paragraph.)

2. Hold down the Ctrl key and keep it held down.

3. Select the next piece of text.

4. Select the next piece of text.

5. When you're done, release the Ctrl key.

6. Now apply the formatting or just generally have your way with the text.

7. You'll see the formatting change.

8. Click somewhere else in the document to deselect the text.

 

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Comments

[Andrew Price]

Fantastic tip! Thx so much. :)

[Solveig Haugland]

Glad it works for you -- it's really dandy and I've been using it EXTENSIVELY in a recent conversion/reformatting project.

Solveig