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How to Select All on a Mac in 4 Ways [Photos, Files, Text, etc.]

Updated on Monday, April 29, 2024

Written by

Jessica Shee

English

How to Select All Items on Mac in 4 Ways

It is easy to select one single file on your Mac by left-clicking on it, but often you will need to quickly select everything in a folder or in a document to copy it to somewhere else. Then you might be struggling with how to select all on Mac. 

This article goes over 4 methods to help you easily select all items on a Mac computer or all texts on a webpage or Word document. 

The simplest way: press Command + A to select all files in a window

The quickest method to select all on Mac is to use a Command (Cmd)-A keyboard shortcut. These two keys will highlight all available material within an open window. The key combination selects every file when used within a folder; when used on a webpage, it selects all text, graphics, videos, and more. Then you can carry out further operations like mass deletion and mass copying. 

As mentioned before, this is not the only way to select all on a Mac. You can find 3 alternative ways to select all files on Mac.

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Use the Select All option in the Edit menu

When your Command or A key isn't working, you may want to avoid using a keyboard shortcut. In that case, you can still get the same effect by choosing an option from the Finder menu bar at the very top of the screen.

Open any application, document, or website on your Mac, click on the Edit menu at the top of your screen, and click Select All. This will highlight all contents in the active window again. 

How to select all on Mac with Click and Drag

Another way to select all on Mac without using the keyboard is the Click and Drag method. This will be quick if you only have a few items in a folder or want to select a block of text. If you need to scroll down in the window, this isn't very efficient. 

Just drag the pointer to create a selection box that covers everything you want to select.

Select all on Mac using Shift and Click

As previously stated, there are occasions when it is not practical to select everything by clicking and dragging, particularly when viewing files, images, and programs in a Finder window as lists. Another handy option to select all content in a window is to select adjacent files with the Shift key being pressed. 

You select the first file you want to select, press and hold the Shift key, and click on the last item you need. The two selected files and every file in between will be automatically selected in this manner.

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Conclusion

Hopefully, the methods in the article solve your problem of how to select all on a Mac computer. You can now speed up your efficiency after you master the file selection tips by avoiding selecting one item at a time