How To Select Noncontiguous Text in Pages and Other Apps

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's look at how to use non-contiguous text selections in Pages and other Mac Apps. 

MacMost is brought to you thanks to a great group of more than 2000 supporters. Go to MacMost.com/Patreon. There you could read more about it. Join us and get exclusive content and course discounts.   

So a fairly new feature to Pages and other apps like Numbers and Keynote is the ability to make non-contiguous text selections. That means you can select a piece of text, say a few words in one paragraph, and then another few words in another paragraph at the same time. It doesn't have to be one continuous text selection from one character to another. So to use this make sure you're using the most recent version Pages, since this is a new feature. Now continuous text selection is when the cursor is at one point and you were to select some text like this. This is continuous, from one point to another. 

So the new feature is that you can select something at one point of text, like right here, and then also select something later and have both parts of the text selected at the same time. The way you do this is to use the Command Key. So I'm going to hold down the Command Key down and I'm going to make another selection by clicking and dragging. You can see how I've got these two sections of text selected. They are non-contiguous since they don't touch each other. You can continue to make more. So I can select more text here and some more text here. 

One catch is that it has to be in the same text area. So in a Pages document if you're using Word Processing mode then body text counts as one text area. So I can select non-contiguous areas throughout the body text. However, if you're using Page Layout mode where you have different text boxes, like this, then you can use non-contiguous text selection in the same box. So, I can select some text here and then Command click and drag to select some more text here. But I can't then select something in this other textbox. If I click that it simply selects the boxes. So it restricts it to one box or one shape or one text element at a time. 

Now you can select things in other ways as well. So, for instance, if you were to double click a word it selects the entire word. Then if you were to hold down the trackpad or mouse on that second click and drag you could see it selecting by word. You can use this with the Command Key now. So I can double click on this word and drag and select words. It is easy then to select lots of words by just double clicking on the words while holding the Command Key down. Likewise a triple click selects an entire paragraph. If I held the Command Key down I could do a triple click to select two paragraphs. You have to use the mouse or trackpad to do this because with text selection, like I'll hold Shift and then right arrow here to select these characters, to get to another position I need to use the arrow keys and that removes the selection. So there is really no way to do this just the keyboard. 

You can deselect things to make a non-contiguous selection as well. I'm going to click here and drag, select most of this paragraph. Then I'm going to hold the Command Key down and select something in the middle, thus removing it. I can double click, say, to select words. Double click and drag to select by word. So I've got a non-contiguous text selection that I made by selecting one thing and then cutting things out of it. 

So what can you do with this? Well, one thing you can do is if you select several things like this any style changes you make would be reflected across all those. So I can go to Format, Font, and Bold and will make all of the things selected bold. Or I can simply use Command B and that works as well. I could also use the Sidebar to make changes. So, for instance, I'll change the text color here and you can see it does that for the entire selection. 

Now it is not always a good idea to do this. One disadvantage is that if you make a change like that and then you want to make the change again you've got to redo the selection. You have to select each of these. It's fine if it is four things like this one paragraph. But imagine if it's 30 things across several pages. In that case then you want to use the feature that has been around Pages for a long time. Use Character Styles. So I've got these selected here. I can go in here to Character Styles, choose one of these or just make a change, like let's change the color here, and I will create a new character style, like that. I'll call this Test. Now if I were to go into just one of these I could see it's Style Test. I can change the color and then update the Style. You can see the Style is updated everywhere. So there are a lot of cases where it still makes sense to use Character Styles and not do the multiple selection especially if it is a longer document and there are a lot of things you want to select and make a style change to. Also, Character Styles will work across different elements. So if you've got a Layout document with lots of Text boxes, you can use Character Styles to make changes like this but you can't use  non-contiguous selections. 

By the way Paragraph Styles work with non-contiguous selections as well. So all you need to do is select one word in this paragraph and one word in this paragraph. If I change something in Paragraph Style, like for instance let's go and change the line spacing. Notice how it is changing the line spacing of the two paragraphs that are part of the selection and not the paragraph that has no selection in it at all. But in most cases you're going to want to use Paragraph Styles for that kind of thing and not non-contiguous selections. 

So what else can you do? Well, one thing you can do is if you make a non-contiguous selection, you can delete all of those things. So I've got three words selected here. I can now press the Delete Key on the keyboard and it deletes all three of them. This can be handy to quickly see a bunch of changes applied at once and then, of course, you can get them back with a single Undo. So Command Z here or Edit Undo will bring back all three of those. 

Now if you select text and start typing it replaces what's there. It can't really do that with three things like this. So notice if I were to do it, it just replaces the first thing, brown, but the other two just disappear. 

Now what if you were to Copy by using Edit Copy or Command C. So if I copy these three things, let's go to the end of the document here, and Paste, notice I get those three things, each on it's own line. So this can be handy if you want to remove things, like entire sentences, from something you're writing. You can either copy them or use Command X to cut them out. Then paste them somewhere else so you keep them around in case you want to use them elsewhere. 

Now similar things happen if you Drag. So, for instance, if I were to Drag any one of these selections, all three of them are dragging. I can put them here at the bottom and you can see how it's just like cutting them and pasting them somewhere else. You could also start dragging and with the Option Key you can see you get a little Plus symbol there showing it is not going to cut them, but it is simply going to make a copy of these things and put them somewhere else. So those all work as expected. 

But what is really interesting is what happens if you try to Paste while you've got a variety of things selected. So, for instance, let's select this word here. I'm going to use Command C to Copy it. Let's select three different words. This one, this one, and this one. Now if I use Command V to Paste these two words will go away and this one will get the paste. That kind of makes sense. But here's what's interesting. What if I were to select three words like these, jumps, filled, and creatures. Copy them and then select three different words. I'll select this one, this one, and this one. Now I'll Paste. You could see it actually replaced each one of those three items with the three items I copied before. So if the number of items matches then you can actually replace multiple things at once. If you were to select just two words, like this, and then select three words like this, and Paste, you could see the first two get replaced and then the second one is just removed. If you were to select four different words like this, I've made separate selections for each one, Copy, and then select three words and then Paste you can see the three words are replaced with the first three words of that and then it adds a new line and the fourth word. 

So it's probably some interesting uses with that functionality. So you can do this in Numbers as well but only within the same text area. So, for instance, here in this cell I can select this word and then I'll Command double click and select another word in there. But there is no way for me to select a word here at the same time. These are two different text areas. Note you could have always selected two entirely different cells like this using Command Click and now I've selected both of these. It's just selecting text inside that you can't do. The same would go if you were to create a textbox, not a table. You couldn't select things between two different textboxes. It all has to take place inside this same text box. 

The same thing in Keynote. You can inside of a single textbox use Command to make a non-contiguous selection. But you can't do it inside two textboxes. It has to be all in the same box. As of yet you can't do this in a lot of other apps. So, for instance, here in Mail you would think you would be able to do it here. I can select some text there but if I Command click to select another area you can see it only allows me to select one continuous selection at a time. The same in, say, Safari in a form that you're filling out and lots of other Mac apps. But hopefully the inclusion in Pages, Numbers, and Keynote means that this will soon spread to a lot of other apps in macOS as well. 

Disappointedly you can't do it in TextEdit either. So you can't do it that way. You can use Option Drag to select a non-contiguous selection as long as it is in a rectangle. But you can't select multiple areas of your choosing. There are some third party apps that allow you to do this. For instance my favorite text editor, CotEditor, which you can get in the Mac App Store absolutely free, allows you to do this using the Command Key, just like with Pages. So there's a look at non-contiguous text selection. A new tool that is available to us in Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.