Loren Heiny

Smarter/cheaper smartphones, smaller/cheaper laptops, and a weak marketing push... IMO. - Mark Martinez via twhirl

To select arbitrary text let's say in WordPad with touch panning enabled in Windows 7, simply tap on the onscreen keyboard button, press a key like the Ctrl, Shift, Fn key (though other keys work, these don't do anything so I prefer them), then use your finger to select text. Tapping on the onscreen keys seems to temporarily disable the panning feature so you can use your finger for classic editing as you could by default in previous versions of Windows. To restore the panning, close the keyboard or toggle the key you pressed earlier. Note: You seem to have use the onscreen keyboard to toggle the mode. Using the physical keyboard doesn't seem to do this. There also may be other ways to enable/disable panning easily for editing. I'm still searching. This appears to be one way. - Loren Heiny

You can also set the current position in WordPad let's say, and then open the onscreen keyboard, press ctrl and shift keys, and then tap where you want the selection region to extend to. Panning is still enabled during this time so you can scroll to parts not in view and then tap to extend the selection region. - Loren Heiny