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re: Turning off "select entire words" in IE Thursday, October 15, 2009 at 6:52 pm Posted by Ricer46 (23825 messages posted) I'm still on IE6, and it doesn't do that. You'll find few here who have found a compelling reason to switch to IE8, in fact most here use Firefox. On Thursday, October 15, 2009 at 1:50 pm, Mike wrote: >When selecting text in Internet Explorer through a simple click&drag, IE automatically >selects entire words. I know where I want to click with my mouse; my preference >is select one character at a time. > >In Office applications, there is a way of turning this off, but I cannot seem to >find a way in IE -- I just spent 30 min on Google in vain. I really want to turn >off this "helpful" feature! > >FWIW I have XP SP3 and IE 8 > [Reply or follow-up to this message] re: Turning off "select entire words" in IE Friday, October 16, 2009 at 2:25 pm Posted by MartinM (7551 messages posted) I have one PC with IE7 - I can click and drag easily enough within a word (which maybe what you want ?) although when dragging beyond the word in question I pick up the next whole word - if you see what I mean. You can select anything without whole word selection by putting the cursor at the start point, holding down SHIFT and using the arrow keys. I think this is the easiest solution. If that won't do, I think you need to describe exactly what your mouse is doing and what you get / what you want. Maybe you have to dump IE8 - I can't imagine why that could be a problem ? [Reply or follow-up to this message] re: Turning off "select entire words" in IE Friday, October 16, 2009 at 3:08 pm Posted by Mike (2 messages posted) Thanks for the replies so far. Martin: You describe the behavior correctly. Within a word, click-dragging selects one character at a time. It selects whole words when you select any part of two or more words. Using the arrow keys is one work-around. The other work-around requires some dexterity: Using the mouse, drag the selection forward from the first word into second word (as normal), then drag it backwards into the first word again, then drag forward again into the second word--that seems to shut off automatic word selection. Neither of these work arounds are very convenient, IMHO. As I mentioned, this awful feature can be shut off under the Options window in most other MS apps, but it seems hardcoded in IE8. If there's any way to fix this, I assume it's in the registry. But I'll wait a couple more days to see if anyone knows. And then, I'll probably switch to FF. I really dislike this behavior. [Reply or follow-up to this message] re: Turning off "select entire words" in IE Friday, October 16, 2009 at 5:24 pm Posted by MartinM (7551 messages posted) I believe it is hard-coded and there's no real fix. Its not unique to IE8. [Reply or follow-up to this message] Tip: Use one of the [Reply or follow-up to this message] links above to add a message to this thread Search this forum Start a new thread on a different subject Report abuse of the forum Return to the Windows XP Discussion Forum