How to make Microsoft Word selection behave like it would in a plain text editor?

Question

Whenever I select a section of text in MS Word, it automatically alters the selection to add or remove whitespace depending on the context of the selection.As a developer that works with plain text all day, I expect that when I place my curser over a character and click/drag backwards to select a group of text, that the place I initially clicked will be the end of the selection. However, Word seems to insist that in some cases it must also select some trailing spaces and/or newline characters.**How can I simply turn off all "smart" selection behavior?**I have already deselected "select entire word when selecting text" and while this is helpful, it still does not solve the problem of automatically selecting the newlines and spaces after the word. (e.g. if I click the end of a sentence and drag backwards a couple of lines, it will expand the selection to include the newline at the end of the sentence. likewise if I select a word and delete it, it deletes an additional space.)I am using MS Word 2016 but this applies to all versions over the last 10-15 years or so.

Answer 1

Hello,

While this question is quite old, my recommendations might be of help to others. It is recommended to utilize the free Notepad++ application as a text editor over Word if possible since this is made for text editing and Word is not. After the text is inputted into Notepad++, it can then be copy and pasted into Word if needed to check spelling, etc. The option to ensure text is selected in Word and not spaces, would be to go into File->Options->Advanced and then make sure "Use smart paragraph selection" is unchecked. Hope this helps!