Selecting With the Magic Box

Here's a handy trick to kick off your weekend.

You've got a few columns of text in a Word document, separated by tabs. 
They're not in a table.

Now, you want to format just one of the columns without impacting the text in
any of the other ones.  Think you have to manually select and format every
word in the column manually?  Not so!

Simply hold down the Alt key and drag a box around the text you want to
format.  Let go of the Alt key and all of the text within the box is
selected!  Apply formatting until your heart is content.  Or, perhaps
click Copy to put the selected text on the clipboard.

Use ALT+Drag to select a box of text in Word

The same trick works in the Visual Studio text editor as well... on a monospaced
file it can sometimes work miracles!  You'll find that this works in all
modern versions of Word.

By the way, the selected text is blue instead of black in the picture above
because I used Word 12 to grab the screenshot.  Unlike previous versions of
Word which used a simple inversion of the background and text colors to show
selection, Word 12 uses a lightened version of the Windows selection color.