Select Text Vertically in Microsoft Word

If you often need to use Microsoft Word for writing documents, you’ve probably come across the situation where you needed to delete the beginning of each line in a list, especially if you are reformatting a document or dealing with text pasted from another source.

Did you realize you can select text vertically? All you have to do is hold down the Alt key, and you can make a vertical selection.

For example, I want to delete the first two words from each item in this list, so I hold down the Alt key and make a selection around the area:

Now I can cut, copy, or just delete the selection.

You can make a vertical selection anywhere in the document, not just with lists. It’s probably more useful when dealing with a similar scenario.