Several months ago, a colleague was editing a file in Visual Studio 2003 and said “…it would be great if you could select a block of text by columns…”. He was therefore a little surprised when I mentioned that you have been able to do this since around version 4 of what was then called Visual C++! If you hold down the ALT key whilst right-click dragging a selection you can select a rectangular block of text. (Ok, I know most people will already know this, but just in case…)