Ive got a suggestion for a minor improvement for MS Word. It involves the
Edit Menu Select All choice. You could enhance this menu item by adding a
sub-menu (similar to the Clear sub-menu just above it) which gives additional
choices beyond Select All, such as Select Paragraph, Select Sentence, Select
Line, Select Word, Select Clause (i.e. from comma to comma/period), Select
Quote (i.e. "Within quotation marks"), Select Page, etc. You could even make
it context sensitive so that if the insertion point was in a table, for
example, it would change to Select Cell, Select Row, Select Column, etc.

I realize that there are Mouse shortcuts such as double-click, triple-click,
ctrl-click, etc. to perform some of these selections. However, these are
non-intuitive and can be difficult to learn (i.e. someone has to show you or
you have to read it somewhere) and also to remember. I realize, as well,
that there is the use of the click and drag selection process which is very
intuitive, but can be difficult or clumsy for absolute beginners.

I teach Windows and Office to beginning students and see many of them
struggling with the mouse. They have particular trouble with Drag & Drop and
with Dragging to Select Text. I know its hard for most of us to remember,
but the mouse takes some practice to get the hang of.

Ive recently taken to recommending that students start by using the Task
Pane in Windows Explorer (in XP only) for copying and moving files. They
seem to achieve a much more consistent level of success with that method than
with Drag & Drop.

It was that, plus the Edit Menu Clear sub-menu just above Select All, that
got me thinking about this solution for the problems I observed in beginners
with selecting text. They often miss the period or Paragraph Mark at the end
when selecting sentences or paragraphs or get too many or too few spaces,
etc. This way they would reliably get a complete sentence, paragraph, etc
for their copy or move.

I dont think it would clutter up the Edit Menu or unduly hamper someone
trying to do a Select All. Most people quickly discover Ctrl+A for that
anyway. This is the only downside that I can see.


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