Quick Change: upper- to lowercase, and more

Has your writer used all uppercase letters “for legibility”? Did they use them liberally for emphasis? Fix it all with a click (or 3):

  • Select the text to change, then
  • click the Change Case icon on the Home ribbon and
  • select the preferred style.

That’s it.

screenshot of capitalization options on the ribbon
Simply pick one of the 5 options.

Keyboard Shortcut

shift + fn + F3

Keep your speed up by not taking your hands off the keyboard. You can access the Change Case function with a little finger yoga. Keying shift + F3 will toggle through the cap settings for whatever text you have selected (or whichever single word the cursor is currently placed in). It becomes finger yoga when you also need to press the fn key to access the basic F3 function instead of “show all windows” or whatever action that key is mapped to by default.

To select text without taking your hands off the keys, hold the shift key and option (alt for Windows users) keys while you arrow across words. This even works with the up and down arrows, and the home and end keys!

shift + opt + ➡️

Troubleshooting

  • Word doesn’t track these changes. You can either type the changes to have them tracked or do some fancy copy–paste moves to show it’s been done. Some editors just leave a comment noting that it was done, either globally or on each instance.
  • Capitalize Each Word actually does capitalize every word. It doesn’t create title case; even mid-phrase “the” and prepositions like “to” and “in” will be capitalized. But this may still be a big time saver.
  • Try a different change, then the one you want, if it doesn’t seem to be working.
For more tips on making font changes, start in Chapter 6.



Got a gnarly Word problem? Submit your problem and we’ll try to answer it in the Q&A thread.



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