Word auto-highlighting, how to make it STOP!

Anonymous
2014-01-17T18:00:43+00:00

How do you disable this STUPID feature?

I'm trying to highlight a single word or some part of a word for cut&paste operations and Word auto-highlights the whole line and sometimes the whole paragraph or page.

I can be using a mouse, I can be using the shift+arrow keys, it doesn't matter. The auto-highlight takes over.

it seems to be worse on any kind of bullets and numbering or any header/footer fields.

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auto-indent is another evil feature. cut and paste from a notepad  and the indent is changed on your bullets and numbering. pretty much control-v means indent text right ->

Microsoft 365 and Office | Word | For home | Windows

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  1. Anonymous
    2018-04-12T19:34:17+00:00

    I'm also having this problem, in notes in Word 2016. I click on the text in any note, and the whole note gets highlighted. Within the highlighted text, I can place the cursor and try to drag, but if I go beyond the next line from where I placed the cursor, the "secondary highlighting" goes all the way back to the beginning of the note. No way to make it not do that.

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  2. Stefan Blom 352.5K Reputation points MVP Volunteer Moderator
    2017-10-13T08:10:19+00:00

    If you clear the option for smart paragraph selection, Word won't automatically include the paragraph mark when you select text.

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  3. Anonymous
    2017-09-20T03:15:54+00:00

    I found this:

    file/options/advanced/

    uncheck "automatically select entire word"

    uncheck "smart paragraph selection"

    There are a couple other "smart" features left to uncheck, I left them in for now, but "smart paragraph" is definitely evil.

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  4. Anonymous
    2018-03-11T02:26:19+00:00

    Well I just happend to have bought new mouse today wondering if that was the problem & ive just installed it afer your advice and its worked!! Thank you so much!! Im blown away how much time I spent on trying to solve this and persevering with the problem to get documents out - THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU!! Very happy here, you've made my day :) :)

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  5. Anonymous
    2017-05-04T15:55:03+00:00

    It seems that the selection occurring is due to Smart Paragraph Selection. Try disabling it.

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