The Mini toolbar is a floating palette which automatically appears when you highlight text. Initially all the options it contains are discreetly dimmed. However, when you position the cursor over its controls, the Mini toolbar becomes activated.

It offers a selection of handy options for formatting your text. All of these options can equally be found in the Home tab of the Word Ribbon. The top row of Mini toolbar icons allows you to change the font, size and colour of our text and also contains Word’s nifty Format Painter. Word’s Format Painter tool allows you to copy the format of the selected text to other areas of your document.

The second row of the Mini toolbar has buttons for making text bold, italic, centre aligned. It also has tools for changing the colour of the highlighted text, indenting text and converting your text to bullet points.

The Mini toolbar offers a very convenient way of quickly formatting your text without having to go back to the Ribbon to find the options you’re looking for. However, there are times when it can be inconvenient. This is particularly true when using the drag-and-drop facility within Microsoft Word.

This feature allows you to highlight text and simply drag it to a new location. However, just as you are about to drag, it’s very easy for the cursor to collide with the Mini toolbar and instead of dragging your text, you simply change its format.

As a Word user, you’ll decide whether you like the Mini toolbar facility. If you decide it is more trouble than it’s worth, Word allows you to deactivate this facility. From the Office button, choose Word Options. In the Popular category, the very first option is “Show Mini Toolbar on selection”. If you have had enough of the Mini toolbar, simply deactivate this option. Now, whenever you highlight text, the Mini toolbar will not appear.

Even when you have asked Word not to display the Mini toolbar, it is still possible to show it by simply right-clicking on selected text.

As well as using the mouse, Microsoft Word 2007 contains a number of useful options for selecting text via the keyboard. Most of these options involve using the Shift key in conjunction with other keys. However, there are also some techniques which rely entirely on the keyboard.

Making discontiguous selections

One such technique is click followed by Shift-click. To use this technique, click to mark the start of the area that needs to be highlighted. Next, hold down the Shift key and click to mark the point where you want the highlighting to end. All text between the two clicks will then be highlighted.

Using Shift and Control

A more well-known technique is click followed by Shift-click. To use this technique, click to mark the start of the area that needs to be highlighted. Next, hold down the Shift key and click to mark the point where you want the highlighting to end. All text between the two clicks will then be highlighted.

Using the Home and End keys

The Shift key can also be used in conjunction with the Control key. For example, beginning at the start of the document, if you hold down Control and Shift and press the right arrow, you will select word by word instead of character by character. Similarly if you press Control, Shift and the down arrow, you select paragraph by paragraph.

Using the Home and End keys

Making discontiguous selections

As well as using Shift, you can use Control-Shift. Control-Shift Home will select from the cursor position to the start of the document. Control-Shift end will select from the cursor position to the end of the document.

Making discontiguous selections

One final highlighting technique definitely worth mentioning is the use of the Control key in conjunction with the mouse. This enables you to make discontiguous selections: in other words, selection that have gaps. For example if we want to select just the headings in a particular document, you can drag across the first heading to select it; hold down the Control key and drag across each of the other headings. You will notice that the headings will be selected while the text between them is not. You can then change the format of your headings and none of the other text will affected.

Sometimes, when you look at a document which was created by someone else, you are at a loss as to which characters they have used to format the document. If they are not experienced in using programs like Microsoft Word, they may be prone to common errors; things like using the space bar instead of the tab key and entering two spaces after a full stop. Microsoft Word’s Show/Hide feature displays symbols representing these invisible characters. This can help you both to find out what characters someone else has used within a document and to spot errors in your own work.

The Show/Hide button can be found in the Paragraph group of the Home tab of the Microsoft Word Ribbon. It is a toggle or switch: click to show invisible characters and click again to hide them.

The most common symbol which is encountered when invisible characters are being shown is the dot. This represents a space. A tab is represented by an arrow which is obtained by pressing the Tab key on the keyboard. Then we have a paragraph symbol represents the end of each paragraph. This is obtained by pressing carriage return. Many people insert two returns at to end each paragraph which tends to create too much space. Word’s Show/Hide feature will confirm where this has been done.

A curved arrow represents a line break (as opposed to a paragraph break) which can be obtained by holding down the Shift key while pressing return. Line breaks can also be generated automatically when a piece of text is passed repeatedly from one environment to another; for example, when an e-mail is forwarded from person to person.

When non-printing characters are being displayed, page breaks, column breaks and section breaks are also indicated. A page break is indicated by the words “Page Break” preceded and followed by a dotted line and section and column breaks are indicated in a similar way.

The Show/Hide facility does nothing to help you clean up documents but it’s a very useful starting point to tell you what’s wrong with a document that does not look right or prints in a strange way. Using this facility you can work out what needs to be changed. To actually clean up the document you normally use the Replace command which is found in the Editing section of the Home tab of the Word Ribbon.