Turn off "smart" selection

[Ron Kinner]

Anybody know how to turn off that annoying Internet Explorer ???smart??? selection?

When I click in the middle of a word and try to select the letter just to the left, the fool thing selects the whole word when most of the time I just want to select and change one letter. I turned this off in Word but can???t seem to find a similar option in IE (6.0 SP1 on Win2K SP3).

Ron

[Roger Faucher]

Ron:

Sorry, haven't found a thing! Does it fail if you click a word in a message on this screen and drag right or left?

Roger

[Ron Kinner]

Good point. It doesn't seem to do it unless I'm in one of these little fill-out-a-form boxes. I trust yours does the same thing?

Also I'm at home now working on an old Win95 with IE5.5 and it does the same stupid thing.

Ron

[Jorge Pinto Leite]

Ron
I have exactly same versions as you, and as far as I am carefull not to go out of the word it just select the letters I want.

[Roger Faucher]

Ron:

Try Tools/Internet Options/ and click on the Content tab, then click Autocomplete under Personal Information and uncheck the Forms selection. HTH.

Roger

[Ron Kinner]

That's not it. It was already unchecked. That's just the one that remembers your address and such for filling out forms.

Ron

[Jon Finley]

I've been trying to track this down with no luck either.

Although, I experience the following in forms:
If I single-click then click and drag or single-click and drag, I select letters. If I double-click I select the entire word.

Have you done anything with your mouse settings to have a single-click respond as a double click?

Jon

[Ron Kinner]

I haven't messed with the mouse tho I did check the mouse settings today.

I see the same progression with clicks. Two clicks the word and three clicks the paragraph.

I need to correct my original problem statement: It appears it is not the middle of the word but when I click on the space between the first and second letter and then try to select the first letter by moving to the left that it selects the whole word. I do this a lot because I tend to forget the capitalization and then go back and change it and about half the time I select to the right of the first letter instead of to the left and then when I move left I get the whole word.

Ron

[Jon Finley]

No.... haven't found a way to stop the default behavior, but.....

have a work-around:
Click and hold on the space between the 1st and 2nd letter.
Move to the first leter (highlights the word)
move back (un-highlights word)
move back to first letter (only highlights the first letter)
release the mouse button.

Jon

[Roger Faucher]

Ron:

Have you tried starting to the left of the first letter and move to the right?

Roger

[Ron Kinner]

Roger,

Sure I can live with it but it annoys me. I would rather the thing do what I want and not make me do things its way.

Ron

[Ron Kinner]

Just realized that the same behaviour occurs in Outlook when writing a letter so it appears that it is not an Explorer problem but a Windows problem.

Ron

[Effaney Crain]

I turned this off by going to msconfig. There is a tab in the startup that enables the smart select, so I just disabled it in there, and haven't had that problem. If this doesn't fix it, it you just click your mouse once(and very slowly), lol, you can just outline 1 letter. HTH!

Effaney

[Ron Kinner]

I run Win2K and it doesn't have msconfig but I found a site which said I could use the one from XP so I downloaded and installed it and it works. However, I don't see anything that looks like smart select under the startup or any other tab.

Clicking once doesn't seem to do much for me. It still select the whole word.

Ron

[Roger Faucher]

Ron:

Have we tried this yet?

In Outlook (I'm on OL2000), click Tools/Options/Other, select Advanced Options and un-select "When selecting text, automatically select entire word".

The same option is available in Word via Tools/Options/Edit.


Let me know if it works, then I'll try to find the IE solution.

Roger

[Ron Kinner]

No cigar on that one. I unchecked it years ago. I think it must be a regedit change if it can be done at all.

Ron

[Roger Faucher]

Ron:

I'm confused. I'm running XP-Pro w/SP1 and Office 2000. I can change these settings in Outlook and Word and see the results immediately.

What version of Office are you running? Do you have the latest SPs?

[Ron Kinner]

I run Win2K SP3 with all of the latest updates to it from windowsupdate.microsoft.com and IE6 SP1. Office 2000 is not so up-to-date since the updates require the CD which the company IT people refuse to let me have. However, my main beef is with Internet Explorer when I fill out these little form windows like I am doing now. I am not a good typist and often have to go back and make changes. I just want it to select what I ask for and not go wild and select the whole word. Word works nicely for me and is well behaved in that regard but IE and Outlook are both too helpful.

Thanks for trying.

Ron

[Roger Faucher]

Ron:

Try this out. Send yourself an e-mail in Plain Text and anotherin HTML. Open each one and see iff you get the same results I did. Word selection in HTML - letter selection in Plain Text. Which probably comes from IE, somehow. What do you think?

Roger

[Ron Kinner]

I see the same thing. Even before I send the email if I check Format/HTML it starts doing the select whole word stuff otherwise if I keep to my default of Plain Text I have no problem. It is when I return other peoples email and write a reply that I see the funky selection so I quess they sent me something in HTML.

Ron

[Roger Faucher]

Do you agree that this is a 'function' carried over from IE and that if we can stop the behavior in IE, it will stop in Outlook? I think I'll pursue that for a while.

Rog

[Ron Kinner]

It's possible. I have a old copy of Netscape 3.0 on my home computer. I sort of remember that it did it too so it may not be limited to IE. I will check when I get home tonight and let you know.

Ron

[Ron Kinner]

Netscape does it differently so hopefully IE is the culprit.

Ron

[Ron Kinner]

Thought I'd bounce this up to the top since I still want to know how to kill the smart selection.

Ron

PS The ??? used to be single quotes or apostrophes but they got eaten when the forum changed platforms.

[Roger Faucher]

Hi Ron:

I haven't had a chance to read this yet. Let us know if it is your solution.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1585442,00.asp

Make a great day, MVP!

Roger