Highlighting Data

You can highlight data by swiping or by clicking.

Related Topics
Performing a Basic Swipe

Two terms are used to describe the actions that you take when highlighting data in the Data Source area.

  • Swipe. This action involves highlighting data by clicking your mouse button, dragging it across the desired data, and releasing the mouse button. The behavior of swiping text depends on the current section format. For the General Text format, swiping across several columns selects exactly those characters (e.g., fixed column, fixed length). Swiping down selects multiple whole lines. For the Vector format, a swipe selects multiple elements of the vector. For the Table format, a swipe may select all or part of a row, a column, or a sub-table.

  • Click. This action involves placing your mouse cursor on a particular location in the Data Source area and clicking the mouse button a number of times (single-clicking, double-clicking, and triple-clicking). For the General Text format, a single click selects the current word or item, a double-click selects the current word, and a triple-click selects the whole line. For all other formats, a click selects the current item and double and triple-clicks have no additional effect.

Note: For the General Text format, selecting a word with a click and selecting characters with a swipe result in different behaviors. When a word is selected, the data will be located at run time by counting the number of words from the beginning of the line (no matter the length of the words). When characters are selected, the characters at exactly those positions on the line are used—if something earlier on the line became longer, the data will no longer fit within the swipe. It is not recommended that you swipe characters of text except when reading or writing data to be processed by a Fortran formatted read or write action. Swiping all the characters of a word is the same as clicking on the word. Swiping part of a word or the text of more than one word, selects a range of characters. The Swipe Details area shows you if the data were selected by a word or by characters.