Change Case in Word, Google Docs and Other Editors

Microsoft Word

In Word, select the text and open the Home tab. In the Font group, the button with the letters Aa opens the Change Case menu. The options are Sentence case, lowercase, UPPERCASE, Capitalize Each Word and tOGGLE cASE. Choose one and Word changes the selected text. The keyboard shortcut Shift+F3 cycles through some of these styles with each press; on many Mac keyboards, the shortcut is Fn+Shift+F3.

Word's Capitalize Each Word option capitalizes every word without keeping small words in lowercase, so for a proper title you still need to fix words like of and the by hand, or use a converter that follows a style guide. Sentence case in Word capitalizes the first letter after a full stop, but it does not know names, so proper nouns written in lowercase stay lowercase.

The All Caps trap

Word has two ways to show capitals. The first is real conversion, as above. The second is the All Caps option in the Font dialog, with the shortcut Ctrl+Shift+A, which is only formatting. With All Caps on, the text looks like capitals on screen and in print, but the characters in the document stay as they were typed. Small Caps, Ctrl+Shift+K, works the same way.

The difference matters when you copy text. Copying text that is formatted as All Caps into another program can give you the original lowercase text, because the formatting is lost. If you need real capitals, use Change Case. If you want to keep the text editable in its original form and only change its look, use All Caps, in the same way as the CSS property text-transform on a web page.

Word's AutoCorrect settings

Word can fix capitalization as you type. In the AutoCorrect options, you can switch on or off the options to capitalize the first letter of sentences, to capitalize the first letter of table cells, to capitalize the names of days and to correct accidental use of the Caps Lock key. The last option notices a word such as cAPS and turns Caps Lock off.

These helpers are useful, and they are also a source of unwanted changes. If Word keeps capitalizing the word after an abbreviation such as e.g., or changes a lowercase brand name, you can add exceptions in the AutoCorrect dialog. Check the settings when text behaves in a surprising way.

Google Docs

In Google Docs, select the text, open the Format menu, choose Text and then Capitalization. The options are lowercase, UPPERCASE and Title Case. There is no sentence case entry, so for sentence case you can choose lowercase and fix the first letters of sentences, or use a converter and paste the result back. As in Word, check the output of Title Case for small words and names.

Docs also has a setting under Tools and Preferences that automatically capitalizes words, which controls the capitalization as you type. If your text starts with a lowercase letter and Docs capitalizes it, that setting is the reason. Changes can be undone with Ctrl+Z, and the version history lets you compare an earlier state of the document.

Pages, LibreOffice and other editors

In Apple Pages, the Format panel has a Capitalization menu in the Font section with None, All Caps, Small Caps and Title. As in Word, the All Caps choice here is a display attribute. In LibreOffice Writer, the Format menu has a Text submenu with UPPERCASE, lowercase, Capitalize Every Word, Sentence case and tOGGLE cASE, and Shift+F3 cycles through the case styles.

In TextEdit on a Mac, the Edit menu has a Transformations submenu with Make Upper Case, Make Lower Case and Capitalize. Plain editors such as Notepad have no case command at all, so a converter or a script is the only option there.

Code editors

Code editors are the strongest in this area, because programmers change case all the time. Visual Studio Code has commands in the command palette that begin with Transform to, such as Transform to Uppercase, Transform to Lowercase and Transform to Title Case, and recent versions also offer Snake Case, Camel Case, Pascal Case and Kebab Case. Many other editors, such as Sublime Text, JetBrains IDEs and Vim, have similar functions or plug-ins.

The advantage of the editor commands is that they work on a multiple selection, so you can change a list of names in one step. A converter on a web page is better when you are not in an editor, or when you want to preview and undo conversions quickly.

Which method to choose

For a document, use the built-in Change Case of your word processor, because it keeps your formatting. For text that has to follow a style guide, use a converter with a title case option. For code, use the editor commands. For a quick fix of a few lines of text from an email or web page, a browser converter is the fastest way because you do not need to open another program.

Whatever you use, check the result. Capitalization tools do not know your names, acronyms and brand names, and they cannot see the context. A minute of checking after the conversion is cheaper than a correction after the text has been sent.