how do I select multiple lines or words in a document?

"English is ESL to me and hope I'm not jibber jabbering too much that I'm confusing anyone reading this"

Except for taking eight lines of type before getting to the actual issue, you're not jibber jabbering at all 😉

Native speakers often out do you in this regard. 😁

"missing multiple segment selection"

Still missing, I'm afraid. You can select multiple words or multiple lines, but they have to be contiguous words or lines—all of a piece, with no unselected words or unselected lines between the first and last of the selected words or lines.

You can use the Provide Pages Feedback menu item in the Pages menu to make a request that this feature be included in a future edition of Pages. It will be read, but you'll probably not see results overnight, and possibly won't see the desired results ever.

The standard advice applies: choose the application that will do the job you need it to do.

Regards,

Barry

I work extremely quickly in Pages '09 by selecting many headlines, boldings, italics, snippets of codes and inline graphics at once and applying paragraph, character and list styles at one stroke to all selections. This is painfully slow in Pages 5 and 6, made worse by the differences in the way the downgraded Apps select and apply their formatting, the worst aspect being the need to separately apply paragraph and list styles.

Because Pages allows multiple non-contiguous selections you can also use it to search on words or phrases and apply styles to all found instances.

The problem with people being "unable to think of…" is that that lets Apple get away with its increasingly poor software and actually have those who make little intelligent use of their products sing its high praises.

Peter

Thanks for the explanation; it makes sense now. I use Pages 6.3 for a variety of things including making guides and user manuals to help newbies set up complex equipment with minimal friction. I wouldn't go as far as calling it "poor software" and my usage is far from unintelligent, but I agree that it clearly needs a quite a few more advanced features to improve things for proficient users.

I never got too deep into advanced things back when I used Pages '09, so I never had a chance to miss any of this stuff. But if it was added back in to Pages 6.x, I'm sure I would discover and use these features to speed up my workflow. I left feedback, and I'd encourage you to, as well, if you haven't recently.

I am curious why you'd ever need to select multiple non-contiguous lines of text. I can't think of any situations offhand that would require this ability.

If you're trying to apply a different font or style to different words or whatnot, try using paragraph and/or character styles in Pages. The first go 'round, you will have to select things individually to apply a given style. But if you ever need to change all paragraphs or words using that style, you change just one to suit your needs and then click the blue "update" button and *bam!* every paragraph or word using that style changes to match your style updates.

I'd vote for Pages. It's free, forever, no subscriptions required. Plus, it looks way better and you can easily find that button that does the thing you need, unlike Word with its multiple layers of ribbons.

iEvan 3.0 wrote:

I am curious why you'd ever need to select multiple non-contiguous lines of text. I can't think of any situations offhand that would require this ability.

I produce training manuals which often come from raw or imported web text and pictures.

I work extremely quickly in Pages '09 by selecting many headlines, boldings, italics, snippets of codes and inline graphics at once and applying paragraph, character and list styles at one stroke to all selections. This is painfully slow in Pages 5 and 6, made worse by the differences in the way the downgraded Apps select and apply their formatting, the worst aspect being the need to separately apply paragraph and list styles.

Because Pages allows multiple non-contiguous selections you can also use it to search on words or phrases and apply styles to all found instances.

The problem with people being "unable to think of…" is that that lets Apple get away with its increasingly poor software and actually have those who make little intelligent use of their products sing its high praises.

Peter

farreach84

Use Pages '09.

I have been searching far and wide, even gone back to Indesign for its comprehensive DTP abilities, but have not been able to find anything to match the amazing speed and (mostly) co-operative design of Pages '09. Typically Apple never used their own software so never appreciated what they trashed.

I did try to switch back to Indesign for my manuals but found it so much slower and with so many more gotchas that I just went back to Pages '09 for that and similar tasks.

I like Pages 6's graphics. The snap to feature is flawless and I love the boolean operations, but for everything else it really, truly, utterly, miserably s_u_c_k_s.

Peter

Apple doesn't listen and don't expect that this or the over 120 other features removed will get back soon, if ever. Why should they neither it nor its users knew they were there or have missed them. Apple uses Microsoft products so cares even less.

That's my 35 years experience of dealing with Apple.

I leave feedback but only to get things off my chest. I have no expectation, that Apple, particularly the Apple of the last 5 years will give it the slightest bit of notice. They are all too busy bumping into the glass in Spaceship Earth*. So many smugly self satisfied people wandering around in circles, surveying and producing thousands of middle management reports, bumping into things they can't even see.

What an amazing metaphor, Sir Norman Foster, the architect, must be an Apple user from way back, he understood exactly how Apple works.

Peter

* The [handquote]Environmental[/handquote] Spaceship Earth built on carefully chosen remote fertile agricultural land with 10,980 car spaces.