Even though much of Microsoft Word XP looks and acts the same as it has for at least a decade, I keep running across new or changed features.
For example, here’s a neat new trick, which I’m sure I never would have discovered myself, so it’s a good thing I read about it first. In older versions of Word you couldn’t highlight text that wasn’t contiguous. In other words, you could only click and drag to highlight text all in a line or block.
However, now in Word XP, you can highlight areas of text that are not next to each other. For example, suppose you are writing a press release about your great new plant, the Ultra Daffodil. Every time the word Ultra Daffodil appears, you want it to be bold so it stands out from the rest of the text.
The trick is the Ctrl key. In the imaginary press release, for example, you’d highlight the first instance of Ultra Daffodil. Then while you hold down the Ctrl key on your keyboard, you’d highlight the next one, and so on until you have all the text you want highlighted. (Be sure you don’t let up on that Ctrl key until you’re done.)
Once you have the text highlighted, then you can click the Bold button on the toolbar or press Ctrl+B to bold all the instances of Ultra Daffodil that you highlighted. After you have highlighted the text, you can apply any number of changes to it; you aren’t just limited to bold. For example, you could choose Format|Font and change all the instances of Ultra Daffodil to a completely different font that looks festive and evokes the feeling of Spring.
The end result is that you can make a lot of formatting changes with far fewer keystrokes, which I regard as a mighty fine thing.