Google Docs gets an absolutely wonderful feature that can reduce a lot of work when it comes to properly formatting your document: the ability to select multiple sections of text at once. If you have two sentences separated by a title, or you want to apply the same effect to three different words throughout the paragraph, you can now do so by simply selecting the text at once and applying your changes.
Selecting multiple text sections is extremely simple: select the first bit of text as you normally would, then press the Command (⌘) or Control key, depending on whether you are using a Mac or a Windows machine. Keep holding it down and select the other bits of text you want. Once you’ve selected everything, you can play it and change any formatting bits you want using the toolbar.
Here’s what peak performance looks like. Gif: Google
This is a small thing, but if you have a lot of text to format, using this feature will definitely be easier than, say, using the format drawing tool, which allows you to select a bit of text and copy its formatting in another. Although this tool does not require you to set each parameter individually, it can still require many more clicks depending on how many pieces of text you are trying to change.
The feature can also be used for things other than formatting – say you want to cut a few paragraphs and move them, or you want to add a comment that is appropriate for a few sentences. Repeated choice makes it easy.
There are several situations in which using the feature will not be the best option. For example, if you’re trying to change each header in your document, it’s probably better to just change the style instead of trying to select each header manually. To do this, you can format a header the way you want, then go up to the styles section, select the header level, and click Update. [style] to match. “
With just one click, I can make all text formatted as Heading 1 look like garbage.
While multiselection may not be the perfect tool for every situation, it’s definitely great that Google added it as an option – especially since there are some desktop word processing applications that don’t seem to have this feature (if you know how to pull this off at Apple Pages, please let me know). In a press release, Google says the feature will be gradually introduced into everyone’s accounts over the next 15 days, so if you don’t already have it, you shouldn’t wait too long.
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