MS word users – Fasten your seatbelts and please answer this scintillating enquiry:

You know when you put the cursor in the middle of the word and press some keys for a formatting command, like a superscript, say? My settings are such that the whole word gets formatted, e.g. superscripted. How do I stop this? So that the formatting will just apply to that particular position.

Select the few letters you want the formatting applied to before applying the formatting?

As above, but does this work too?:

file > options > advanced > untick ‘when selecting, automatically select entire word’

Thanks – that’s great.

Sounds like a bit of a stupid question but it’s for scientific documents that have loads of formatting, and inserting then highlighting then formatting characters is annoying on my laptop touchpad.