Replacing a selection

Shortcut

Don't delete when overwriting selected text. Just start to type. The selected text will be replaced by the first character you type.



The long story

In our first lesson, we will be about replacing a selection, something very easy and something which you can make use of quite often.

When you have a text and you want to replace a part of it, it is always better to select the part to be replaced, rather than wasting time and keystrokes deleting it letter by letter.

What most people do after they have selected the which they want to replace, is to delete it by pressing either Delete or Backspace. This is where our shortcut kicks in: It is not necessary to delete the marked part. The selection is automatically replaced with the first character typed.

This shortcut works almost everywhere, no matter what program, what computer you work with – even in sheet calculation programs like Microsoft Excel or Open Office Calc: The black frame around a cell is basically a selection of the cell. So in order to replace its content it is not necessary to delete the old content before. You can just start to type in the new one.

In Microsoft word it is possible to change this default behaviour by unchecking Typing replaces selection (somewhere in Options, Editing). In that case, when you have selected text and start typing, the selection is cancelled and the new text goes next to its former location.