I found out something new the other day; how to copy text out of tables in Firefox in the way I want to copy it.

Before I used to simply select the area with my mouse, which may or may not include a whole bunch of text I didn’t want or need.  Say for instance, I just wanted the column “Why not try” on this page:

Notice how, if I drag, I can’t avoid also selecting some of the text in the left hand column.

I used to work around this by pasting into another application first and deleting the text I didn’t want.

The other day I found that if you hold down the Ctrl key while clicking table cells, you can select any individual cells you want to copy:

Right-click > Copy (Ctrl + V) and the result:

I didn’t know this was possible, and on my system it looks as though it only works in Firefox (I tried Chrome and IE, but haven’t tested in other browsers yet).

Next, I want to be able to select text (not an image) by dragging a rectangle over it and getting the text (as with Block selection in OpenOffice.org).  Perhaps there’s an Add-on for doing this, but I haven’t found it yet.