Saturday, February 14, 2009

Toggling ALL CAPS in Word, Outlook, and Excel

Have you ever received an email or come across a document that was in ALL CAPS? I'm not sure why some people choose ALL CAPS for anything other than a heading or for web shouting, but some do nonetheless. Even in a business setting, you occasionally come across over-zealous typists who just don't know better, but what do you do if you need to re-use the content?

Until recently, I've simply re-typed the content, but the other day I came across this little gem:

[Shift]+[F3].

While in MS Word or Outlook, select the text you wish to toggle, and try that key combo to see the text toggle between ALL CAPS, Proper Caps, and lower case type.

If what you have selected is formatted like a sentence, the "Proper Caps" option will only capitalizes the first letter of the first word of the sentence. If the text isn't formatted like a sentence, it capitalizes the first letter of each word selected.

In MS Excel, you can use the following formulas to to change you text to ALL CAPS, Proper Caps, or lower case:

UPPER()
PROPER()
LOWER()

Now, in Excel, the PROPER() formula always capitalizes the first letter of each word in the selection.

Now that should save some serious typing time!

Now you know, 
Garrett Woodroof

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm a Mac user and would be delighted to be able to use the CAPS toggle. Is there a similar command to use when running Word on the Mac?

Garrett Woodroof said...

I recently read that Apple-Shift-A does this on Macs. Can someone confirm that?

https://macosx.com/tech-support/mac/ms-word-shortcut-to-all-caps/22882.html

Anonymous said...

CONFIRMED! Command/Apple + Shift + A works on me MAC

Anonymous said...

Also fn+Shift+F3 works on my macbookpro to toggle from Full Caps to Proper Caps to all lowercase.

Chris B said...

Dynamite tip! That's saved a ton of rewriting... Cheers!

Dave said...

Oh this is the best thing to come along for my Outlook use in years!
I have a couple of older clients who for some reason or another insist on doing everything in uppercase.
It may be because they have a hard time seeing their fonts, but it drives me crazy to have to read shouting and it gets in the way of our communication.
Thank you for posting this tip. It's really amazing that it's not listed in the Outlook Help index, but considering how scattered M$ has become, perhaps it isn't so surprising after all.

Dave Liston
Liston Investigative Services, Inc.
http://dlistonpi.com

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