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September 14, 2007
Making Selections: Choose Wisely
Dear Larry,
I want to delete a number of files from my Documents
folder. Is there a way to accomplish this other than deleting them one by one?
F. T.
Dear F. T.,
Selecting anything in Windows works pretty much the same way
regardless of what it is you’re selecting. You can generally use the following
tips whenever you’re selecting multiple icons, files, e-mails, pictures,
songs...you get the idea.
We usually select one item at a time using one of two methods:
Hovering the mouse over the item or clicking the item once. How do you know
which? Try hovering first. If that doesn’t highlight the item under your mouse,
then click once.
The most common method to select multiple items is the Shift
key method. This lets you select a group of consecutive items. All you need to
do is highlight the first item in the list of items you want to select. Next,
hold down the Shift key while you highlight the last item in the list. Once
you’ve done this, you can let go of the Shift key, and you’ll find that you’ve
selected a consecutive group of items starting with the first item and ending
with the last item. Keep in mind that if at any time you take your finger off
the Shift key and select another item, your previous selection will be lost, and
you’ll have to start all over.
Suppose the items you want to select aren’t consecutive. Then
you’ll want to use this method to select random items from the list: Select the
first item in the normal way. Then hold down the Ctrl key while you select other
items that you want to include in the selection. If you subsequently want to
remove one of the selected items from the highlighted list, simply select it
again with the Ctrl key depressed. Keep in mind that if at any time you take
your finger off the Ctrl key and select another item, your previous selection
will be lost, and you’ll have to start all over.
Another way to select a group of consecutive items is to
“lasso” them with the mouse: Point your mouse next to but not over the first
item you want to highlight. Then click and drag the mouse in a diagonal
direction to create a temporary box. As you expand or contract the box, items
near or touched by the box will be selected.
Finally, you can combine these methods to select multiple
groupings. To do so, just keep the Ctrl key depressed while you select the
second and all subsequent groups. Thus, you might select the first item in your
list, hold down Shift and select the fifth item—this will highlight items 1-5.
Next, hold down the Ctrl key while you select item 11, then keep both the Ctrl
and Shift keys depressed as you select item 15. Amazing—You’ve highlighted two
separate groups of five items each!
This is Larry Schneider, logging off.
