Categories: Miscellaneous

How To Select Columns of Text in Your Browser (FireFox)

This is a neat trick for copying columns of text from a table into some other application. This is particularly useful when you don’t need the whole table of information, and just want one column or several columns (e.g. just the usernames from a list of members).

I haven’t tried it on other browsers, but it works for me in Firefox 3.6.2. (Another reason why I love Firefox – it’s just so full of functionality). I’m particularly impressed that it’s something that I wouldn’t know that exists, but they’ve already thought ahead about it, and have it fully implemented already.

So here’s the trick – on the Mac, just hold down the Cmd key and select the column that you want by clicking and dragging with your mouse. On Windows, it’s the Ctrl key.

Alvin Poh

I've over 17 years of entrepreneurship experience, having built a tech company to be the top in the country, which was subsequently acquired for an 8-figure sum. As CEO, I led the company through robust growth to 150 employees across 4 countries. After the acquisition, I embraced minimalism, sold off my personal possessions, and started living around the world. Read more about my story here.

View Comments

  • Good old FireFox! I haven't looked back since ditching IE 5 odd years ago, and the experience has just been getting better and better. Who cares if or how this works in IE ;-)

  • Thanks, this really helped. Previosly I used to copy and paste the whole table into a temporary document, then delete all the unwanted columns, then copy what was left... such a lot of work saved!

    Thank you!

  • That is damn awesome trick! With Chrome it does not work, at least not on Linux. I am using Firefox 12 on Linux and I was doing the same as Fioritura, saved me lots of work. THANKS!

    • I just made sure it still works, and it does. You probably have to check that it's an actual HTML table and not a CSS list, because I'm not sure if it works on CSS yet.

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