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Monday 31 March 2008

Keyboard shortcut of the week: The Case of MS Word

When using a word processor it is quite common to forget that that the CapsLock key has been left on, or you might decide that a piece of text looks better in capital letters (also known as upper case: small letters are known as lower case).

Thankfully MS Word has a keyboard shortcut that lets you cycle between different cases and formats. All you need to do is highlight a piece of text, hold down the Shift key and press F3.

Each time you press F3 the case of the letters will change (don't release the Shift key!). So, 'testing' will be replaced with 'Testing' on the first press, and 'TESTING' if you press it a second time. Press F3 again and the text will return to 'testing'.

If you type 'tESTING' by mistake, you can change it to 'testing', then 'Testing', and 'TESTING'; however, it will not return to 'tESTING', probably because it is highly unlikely you'd ever want text to be in that format.

[Addendum]

As one commentator has pointed out, a particular word does not need to be highlighted to have its case changed by this method, all you need to do is have the cursor somewhere within the word. If you wish to change the case of several words then you have to highlight them all. Thanks to A. for this clarification.

15 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ha, that is great! I know it was possible but then I forgot all about it! thanks for this mind-refresher!

Ken Armstrong said...

tHATS A GREAT TIP

Sorry... Caps :)

Really, thought, thanks very much!!

algodon said...

Thanks for the tip. I learnt something new today :)

Anonymous said...

WOW i didn't know that. Thanks a lot!!!!

Anonymous said...

WoW! This is interesting!
I was talking to my friend the other day how nice if computers have that kind of function. Now I know MS Word have em.

Anonymous said...

Outstanding tip, for an irritating problem that has plagued me since word processing. Consider his post Stumbled.

Anonymous said...

Hmmm thanks do much for this tip.. I'll keep this in mind

Anonymous said...

I would be lost without this tip. In fact so much so, that once I had to to change my keyboard because the "special" keyboard I had didn't work with it!

If I'm not mistaken, you don't actually have to highlight the word. It works fine from the cursor being positioned anywhere in the word.

Borkiman said...

Thank you all for your kind words.

A. I have amended the original article to include your point.

Lori said...

What a great tip! Thanks. I could've used this yesterday when I had to remove caps in an article, but I'll definitely remember it going forward.

Great blog. I definitely need to visit here often!

Anonymous said...

That is very cool! Hopefully I'll remember this next time I need to use it. I'll probably spend 5 minutes cycling through every shift, ctrl, alt combination with each of the F Keys before I find the right one but I'm sure it will be worth it.

Anonymous said...

now thats what i call a real help.i dont know how much time i have lost over the keyboard in want of this simple solution.

Borkiman said...

Glad this was a help to you all. K

Sharanya KC said...

Hi! I use Shift+F3 all the time. I would like the equivalent for Shift+F3 in Microsoft works word processor. Can you please tell me
Thank you.

Borkiman said...

KC: I have done some research and it appears that Works does not have an equivalent of Shift+F3.