That feature has been in Word for a number of releases, although it's harder
to use in Word 2003 because Microsoft made a mistake...

Hold down the Alt key while you drag a rectangle around the text you want to
select. In earlier versions this selection method just worked, no problem.
In Word 2003, Alt+click on text sends the text to the Research task pane, so
you have to be very careful to continue to hold the Alt key through the
entire click-drag-release cycle -- and if you try to drag a rectangle that's
only one character wide, even that caution won't prevent the Research pane
from grabbing the text.

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP FAQ: http://word.mvps.org
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all may benefit.

alw wrote:
Though it is more difficult to accomplish with non-uniformily-spaced
characters, the ability to perform rectangular text operations would
be helpful in Word. A good example of this functionality is in the
text editor, GNU Emacs. Its ability to select, cut, copy, and paste
blocks of text spanning multiple lines and narrower than the page
width is a very powerful feature. This functionality it refers to as
manipulating "rectangles". Also see the function "M-x
string-rectangle". I use Word 2003