Text selection via marquee like the lasso tool in Illustrator or photoshop. This would select individual characters in live (not outlined) text for formatting just the selected characters in interesting ways. This also helps to select a column if you are working in tabbed text rather than text in a table. Also, picture a large body of text where you could highlight say a circle for instance in the middle and make it a bolder font. There used to be a plug in for Quark that did this exact thing.