Why not subscribe to Word Tips World and get regular tips for using Word delivered via your favourite feed reader?

Wednesday, March 28, 2007

Capitalize words and sentences EASILY

Imagine you have a sentence in Word:

Microsoft Word allows you to change a sentence into all caps with one keyboard shortcut

But you suddenly realise you need it all in caps. How are you going to get it into capitals? Surely you weren't thinking of retyping the whole thing in?!

The shortcut SHIFT+F3 is what you need. Just highlight the text (no need to use the mouse for this, but more about that another time!) and press this key combination and you will see the text cycle from the original, to this:

MICROSOFT WORD ALLOWS YOU TO CHANGE A SENTENCE INTO ALL CAPS WITH ONE KEYBOARD SHORTCUT

with one keypress!

By the way, if you press SHIFT+F3 again, you will get this:

microsoft word allows you to change a sentence into all caps with one keyboard shortcut


...and if you press it again, you get:

Microsoft Word Allows You To Change A Sentence Into All Caps With One Keyboard Shortcut


This is not that useful as we do not usually capitalize sentences like this in English, especially not the words like "a, the, to" etc. But if you wanted just to capitalize the first letters of "microsoft word" for example, this would be the ideal way to do it!

So once again, that's SHIFT+F3! Why not give it a go now?

6 comments:

ervz said...

thanks!

Just in the right time. I'm doing titles for a documentary video. I'm just copying from a Word document but needed a quick reformat of some block of text.

Thank you!

stephenlane80 said...

thanks thats a useful tip, i couldnt find it in the MSFT documentation anywhere

ukauctions said...

Thanks - this is a great time saver as I like to captialise database code in my documents - so i'll use it a lot!

Anonymous said...

thanks! this tip helped save me some much needed time. in appellate briefs you need to capitalize entire headings so this was a quick fix for my silly mistake

markowe said...

Glad it helped! By the way, I have since discovered that this is called "title case" (as opposed to "UPPER CASE" or "lower case") It still niggles me though that in most writing, as I mentioned, including appellate briefs probably, we would not normally capitalise minor words like a/the/is etc. So it is annoying that Word's title case function does not take this into account. I have a macro that will do this, but never quite got it into a usable form... Sigh... maybe one day...

Anonymous said...

THANK YOU SO MUCHHHHHHHHHHHHH