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Before you can edit or format your text, you need to highlight it. Highlighting your text is a way of telling Microsoft Word that you want to work with a certain piece of text. (Highlighting is also referred to as selecting.)

The simplest way of selecting text is to position the cursor where you want to start highlighting, click and hold the mouse button down and drag to the spot where you want to end the highlight. It is not essential that you drag across every single line that you want to highlight. It is sufficient to drag in a straight line from the start to the finish.

To deselect your text and remove the highlight, simply click anywhere in your text. The flashing text cursor will then reappear.

Another simple way of selecting text is to select the entire document. This is done via the “Select All” command. In Word 2007, the “Select All” command is found in the “Editing” section of the “Home” Tab. Click to display the “Select” menu and choose “Select All”.

The “Select All” command is found in lots of programs and lots of environments. It can also be accessed via the keyboard using Control-A: that is to say, hold down the Control key while typing “A”.

As well as highlighting characters by dragging across them, Word also allows you to select whole lines. To do this, position the cursor in the left margin and you’ll notice that the cursor changes to an arrow pointing to the right. Once the cursor has changed, you can simply click to select a single line or click and drag to select several lines.

Another way of highlighting text is to click multiple times. To highlight a word, double click on the word; to highlight an entire paragraph, click three times on the paragraph.

It is also possible to select text using the mouse and keyboard. This normally involves using the Shift key. One such technique is click then Shift-click. First, you click to position the cursor at the start of the text to be highlighted; next hold down the Shift key and click to mark the point where you want the highlighting to end. All the text between the two clicks will now be selected.

To select text without the mouse, use the cursor keys on your keyboard to position the cursor where you want your selection to start. Next, press the Shift key in conjunction with one of the cursor keys. To highlight character by character, press the right or left arrow depending on the direction that you want to move. To select line by line press the down arrow or up arrow.

The Shift key can also be used in conjunction with the Control key. For example, if you hold down Control and Shift and press the right arrow, you will select word by word instead of character by character. Similarly, if you hold down Control and Shift and press the down arrow, you will select paragraph by paragraph.

The Home and End keys can also be utilised in this context. For example, if the cursor is in the middle of a line, pressing Shift and Home will select from the cursor position to the start of the line while pressing Shift and End will select from the cursor position to the end of the current line. Holding down Control and Shift and pressing the right cursor key will select from the cursor position to the start of the document. Control, Shift and End will select from the current position to the end of the document.