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?

25 comments:

Anonymous 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

Anonymous 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

Mike said...

This is great! Just what I was looking for. Thanks a lot

Sheetal Mahajan said...

Thanks alot..
It helped out truly.
More short-cuts are welcomed.

markowe said...

Glad you found it useful, there are LOTS more useful MS Word shortcuts that can save you time, I just have to find the TIME myself to write about them..!

Melnar said...

tHANK YOU YOU HELPED ME A LOT.....

Melnar said...

thanks a lot!!!! you helped me very much

Anonymous said...

That is great! However, there is more to capitalization for someone who watches their hands as they type and look up to see everything was reversed because they had the cap lock on.....will word reverse the capitalization for lowercase to become upper as it was intended but also for upper to become lower case as it was also intended and thus render a normal typed sentence? or do I have to keep retyping the whole thing?

charlesw said...

Thanks!

Anonymous said...

This is a neat trick! Will save me a lot of time formatting my references!!

Thank you!

Unknown said...

Thanks! very useful...

Anonymous said...

This did not work for me....

Bob Pierce said...

Great capitalization information! Thanks. And, if you're on a Mac, press command while you select individual words you want first letter capitalization, then press fn + shift + F3 at the same time, and bingo, first letter capitalization for selected words (at least for my middle aged Macbook Pro!) Good luck!

Anonymous said...

thanks dear..

Unknown said...

Thanks! Though hopefully that shortcut doesn't also change typefaces like in your example ;)

Jean Tralala said...

Puts the words in UPPERCASE for Microsoft Powerpoint (2007), though

Thanks!

mjazzguitar said...

The third time thing is cool because sometimes you want capitalize all the words as if the sentence was a headline.

mjazzguitar said...

It didn't work for me.
Instead it appeared to be a command to find all the identical words on the page. They got highlighted as a little window opened in the bottom.

Valent the Dark Rose said...

Nice tips! Thanks a lot.

Valent the Dark Rose said...

Nice tips! Thanks a lot...

Unknown said...

Hi, I don't have a Mac but on Windows 8 the SHIFT+F3 didn't work for me. I did the FN+SHIFT+F3 (pressing simultaneously) that was recommended for Macs and it worked. Thank you!

Close

You are TOO SLOW in MS Word!

Word pro video

Watch how fast this pro uses Microsoft Word™! (VIDEO) - CLICK HERE) and find out how you can massively boost your productivity in MS Word just by learning a few simple "secrets" (our cheat-sheets and video reveal all :))