MS Word and text selection

[acroyear]

Is there any way to get Word (and Outlook) to stop over-selecting for me?  E.g., in the value

This 'is' a test.

I try to just select "is" to bold it and it decides to auto-grab the final ' as well.  I *really* don't want that.  It does it for final punctuation and the space after a string, and sometimes it will over-grab an entire word when I only want part of it done.  I'm very precise about what I want selected, and this nanny-crap is damned annoying.

Comments

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

i wouldn't care if it did because the point is to select by the mouse, not to muck around with right-hand-left-hand mouse-keystroke mucking about. if i have to think about it, it ain't "usable".

[ladylyonesse.livejournal.com]

I was going to say, the only way I know to avoid this is to use the SHIFT + --> or <-- keys.

[blueeowyn.livejournal.com]

which version of Office?

If it is Office 2007 for Word in that colorful thing in the top left corner there is a "Word Options" and I suspect you will want to turn off a bunch of the so-called smart options.

[javasaurus.livejournal.com]

In Office 2003's version of Word, do the following:
Tools --> Options --> Edit (tab) --> uncheck "when selecting, automatically select entire word"

I imagine other versions of Word are similar (though as blueeowyn notes, they fubar'd the interface in Office 2007)

[bkleber.livejournal.com]

I'm on a mac right now and my version of Word often works differently than the PC one at work, but I've noticed that the "smart" crap works different when wiling right-to-left than left-to-right a lot of the time. Try going the other way, and see if that helps.

[3fingeredsalute.livejournal.com]

Using Office 2007 on a Windoze Vista machine, I also see the "smart select" grab the closing single-quote and space thereafter if I double-click the word, but if I click the space between the word and the quote (either right to left or vice versa), it gets the proper letters I have specified.

I don't know if that method is any easier or preferable to the click and shift-arrow the text, but I thought I would throw in my 2 pesos just in case it was useful?