OK, here’s a trick or to related to selecting contiguous & non-contiguous bits of information. This trick works in most programs, such as the Finder, MS Office programs, Pages, and many more. We’ll use Finder for an example because after all, it is the most important program on your system.
Say you have a list of files. You want to do something to a select portion of them, like move them to the desktop. But you don’t want to do it one at a time, right?! You don’t have to. Here’s the trick.
Contiguous Selections
This assumes that you want to select a whole range of files that are all in a row. Click on the first file in the list of them.
This trick works in most text programs, too. Say you’re typing along in MS Word, and you realize you want to drag this entire group of words to the top of the document. Well, click where you want to start, hold shift, then click where you want to end. Now it’s all highlighted, and you can click, hold, and drag this highlighted bit of text to where you want it. Cool!
Non-Contiguous Selections
OK, now say you are looking at the same list of files, but you only want 5 of them, and they’re not side-by-side.
You can also combine these commands to your advantage, as well. Say you have a list of items you need to select, some together and some not. No problem. Just use the Apple Key when selecting individual files & the first of a list, then Shift when you get to the end of a list area, and
And with that we’ll wrap up this quick tutorial on file & text selection in Mac OS X. Get busy arranging things now that you know how easy it is!