Word 2010: Select Word-Only, Without Any Spaces

Hi

 Put your cursor at the start of the word or text you wish to copy and hold the shift key down and   highlight your word using the right arrow in the group of 4 on your keyboard this will allow you to highlight one letter at a time if need be and you can eliminate any spaces or anything else in front or after your text you can do it right to left as well by using the left arrow with the cursor after the word.  You can use the up and down arrows to navigate as well.

Axiomatic Colleague of Mine:

That method is too tedious. You can speed it up by clicking at the beginning of text, then hold down Shift and click at the end of text. In such a case, only the word is selected, no space at the end.

I want, however, to just click the word and the word-only is selected. I don’t know who decides on defaults in Word — they are, more often than not, against what I do more frequently. At least, it should be made crystal-clear how to change defaults and all settings.

Thank you for your consideration.

Ion Saliu,

Writer At-Large

@PamCaswell

Axiomatic Colleague of Mine:

YES, in the end I disabled Smart Paste. My Word 2010 still selects the word and a space at the end. It is nerve-wrecking when that happens several times in a document! You can try it yourself — I don’t know what version of Word you are using. I remember I was successful in older versions of Word.

Right now, there is that dangerous situation, when pasting web addresses in HTML documents. Just look what happens sometimes, as in this example:

http://saliu.com/ aporia.html

Word added a space to the left, which makes the URL non-functional (Error 404 – Not Found). Correctly should be (subtle difference):

http://saliu.com/aporia.html

Thank you for your consideration.

Ion Saliu,

Writer At-Large

Sorry! Those are not the most efficient ways to select exactly what I want to copy and exactly what I want to paste.

So far, this remains the fastest way to select exactly what I want:

Click at the beginning of the word;

Hold down the Shift key;

Click at the end of the word.

I’m still hoping someone from the Word Team would give me a good answer or two. I also suggest to the development team to be more careful with the defaults and make it really easy to change any or many or all defaults.

Best of luck to you all, creatively-axiomatic colleagues of mine!

Ion Saliu,

Writer At-Large