There are tons of neat little tricks to learn so you can use the macOS quickly and conveniently. One of those tricks is how to select all. Anyone coming over from a PC has to get used to the lack of a full right click option or the select all feature might work differently. Or maybe you never realized a Mac had this feature. So below we’ll go over how to select all on a macOS.
The Basic Select All Feature
It’s very easy to select all on a Mac. You simply hit Command and the letter A at the same time on your keyboard. You can use it in a wide variety of settings. If I do it in this Word document, all the text selects:
It even works on the finder if you have that window open. You can also do it if you click your desktop and hit Command-A. Then every document on your desktop will be selected at once.
What If You Just Want to Select a Certain Set of Items?
Selecting a few items is easy as well. If you want a few items off your desktop to drag elsewhere, for instance, simply click by the first document you want to select. Drag the arrow icon until you see a box and then drag that box until it covers multiple documents, like this:
Another option is if you are in a menu like the Finder, you can also select multiple items by clicking on the first item and then holding the Command key. Then you can click on the items you want individually to select them all at once.
If you want to select a whole list at once, click the first item in the list you want, hold the Shift key and then select the last item:
To de-select one item, you can hit Command-A and click the item you want to deselect.
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