Change Case: MS Word

Text can be typed in lowercase or small letters, uppercase or capital letters, or a mix of the two cases. Have you found yourself wishing you could change the capitalization of a section of text without having to retype the whole thing? You can, when you use the Format | Change Case Command.

Proper nouns should be capitalized. The first word of sentences should be capitalized. Titles should be capitalized. What if you forget? What if you capitalize where you normally would not? You can change the case of all the text at once with a single command -- a great timesaver!

To do so:

1. Highlight the text you want to change.
    
2. Choose Format | Change Case. This opens the dialog box that gives you the choice between Sentence case, lower case, UPPER CASE, Title Case, and tOGGLE cASE.

Next, choose the type of formatting you want to use from the below choices and click OK.

• Sentence case: capitalizes the first letter of the first word and puts the rest in lowercase.
   
• Lower case: changes everything to lowercase, with nothing capitalized.
   
• Title case: capitalizes the first letter of every word. Toggle case changes capital letters to lowercase and vice versa. (You don't use this choice much anymore because if you make a mistake such at typing tOGGLE, using the Shift key while Caps lock is on, Word automatically corrects it and turns off the Caps lock.) Alternatively, press the Shift+F3 shortcut key repeatedly to cycle through three formats: UPPER CASE, lowercase and Title Case.

Capitalization is under your control, even for large amounts of text.

When you use Title Case, you'll most likely have to go back and make a few corrections. In titles, small words (such as: articles, coordinate conjunctions, and prepositions, such as "the," "and," "in," "on," "for," etc.) should not be capitalized unless they are the first word in the title.

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