Changing case (Word, all recent versions)

There’s a cool way to change the case of selected text in Word. It’s the keyboard shortcut Shift F3.

After you select some text, just press Shift F3 repeatedly to cycle among lower case, UPPER CASE, and either Initial Caps or Sentence case (depending on whether the text you’ve selected includes a period, which will trigger Sentence case).

Unfortunately, Word isn’t quite clever enough to apply “smart” Initial Caps — in which articles like “the” and conjunctions like “or” are not capitalized. (WordPerfect uses “smart” Initial Caps, so it can be jarring if you are going back and forth between the two programs and you expect Word to do the same.)

Of course, there are other ways to change case in Word, too. In Word 2007, you can use the Change Case drop-down in the Font group on the Home tab. The drop-down includes yet another option, tOGGLE cASE.

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