If you have ever tried to select multiple options in a dropdown menu or multiple cells in a spreadsheet, you know it can be frustrating when each click just highlights a different item. How do you select more than one item?
Select Adjacent Items
Let’s say we want to select items that are adjacent to each other, like the numbers two through five in this example:
- Click on the first cell in the range to select.
- Hold down the Shift key and click on the last cell in the range to select.
- That’s it!
Select Non-Adjacent Items
Shift-click is great if everything you want to select is grouped together. But what if it’s not, like this example?
- Click on the first cell to highlight
- Hold down the CTRL key and click any other cells to include. Pro tip: you don’t need to hold down CTRL the whole time you are selecting. You can let the CTRL key up between selections – just make sure you press it while clicking.
- If you select one accidentally, CTRL-click on it again to deselect it while keeping all others selected.
- Done!
Select All the Items
Sometimes you just want to select everything on the page. You could click at the beginning and drag your mouse to the end. But in a long document, or one with multiple columns, that could get tricky. To select everything on the page, type CTRL-A (for “all”).
Bonus: If you want to select most, but not all, of the items on a page, start by selecting all using CTRL-A. Then you can CTRL-click individual items to deselect them and keep all of the others selected.
Summary
Microsoft Office/Google Workspace documents and spreadsheets are not the only places where selecting multiple items can be useful. Dropdown menus in web forms often respond to these same keyboard/click combinations.
