How to Fix Text Typed With Caps Lock On

The problem and the quick fix

Everyone has done it: you type a sentence, look up and see that it is all in capitals, or that the first letter is lowercase and the rest is capitals. The Caps Lock key stayed on without you noticing. The quickest fix is not to retype. Select the text, paste it into a case converter, click Sentence case and copy the result back.

Which conversion you need depends on what you typed. If the whole text is in capitals, Sentence case gives you normal sentences. If you want everything in lowercase, for example for a list of tags or email addresses, choose lowercase. If the text is a title, choose Title Case. If you typed with caps lock on and held Shift for the first letter of each sentence, your text has an inverted pattern, and the iNVERSE option turns it back.

Using the converter step by step

Open the converter, click the text box and paste your text. The character and word counter shows that the text arrived. Click Sentence case. The tool lowercases the whole text and capitalizes the first letter of every sentence, which is what most people need. You can see the result at once in the same box.

If something looks wrong, click Undo and try another style. When the text is right, click Copy and paste it where it belongs. After conversion, check names, places, acronyms and brand names, since the tool lowercases everything first. It also capitalizes the English word I when it stands alone, but not other proper nouns.

Fixing it in Microsoft Word

Word has a built-in command for this. Select the text, open the Home tab and use the Change Case button in the Font group. The options are Sentence case, lowercase, UPPERCASE, Capitalize Each Word and tOGGLE cASE. The keyboard shortcut is Shift+F3: each press cycles the selected text through a few of these styles, such as UPPERCASE, lowercase and capitalized words. On a Mac, the shortcut is usually Fn+Shift+F3.

Word also has an AutoCorrect option that corrects the accidental use of the Caps Lock key. It detects a word that starts with a lowercase letter followed by capitals, such as cAPS, turns off Caps Lock and fixes the word. The option is in the AutoCorrect settings under the proofing options, and it only helps with new text you type.

Fixing it in Google Docs

In Google Docs, select the text and open the Format menu. Choose Text, then Capitalization. The menu offers lowercase, UPPERCASE and Title Case. Because it has no sentence case entry, a common method is to choose lowercase first and then correct the first letters of sentences by hand, or to use a converter for the sentence case result. Check the result of Title Case, since each tool decides for itself which small words to keep in lowercase.

Docs lets you undo with Ctrl+Z, or Cmd+Z on a Mac, and the version history shows earlier states of the document, which is useful when you converted a long text and want to compare. For a very long document, converting in a separate tool can be faster than clicking through each section.

Windows, Mac and the Caps Lock key itself

If the problem keeps coming back, change the key. On Windows, the Keyboard Manager in Microsoft PowerToys can remap the Caps Lock key to another function or disable it. On a Mac, the Caps Lock key can be set to a different function in the keyboard settings under Modifier Keys, and you can also change how long you have to hold it down so that an accidental tap has no effect. Many Mac keyboards need a slightly longer press to activate Caps Lock.

On phones, Caps Lock is a double tap on the Shift key. Both iOS and Android show a filled arrow or a line under the arrow when it is on, so if your text keeps coming out in capitals, check the arrow. Turning off automatic capitalization in the keyboard settings also helps if the phone capitalizes where you do not want it to.

Fixing capitals in spreadsheets and code

A column of text typed in capitals can be corrected with a formula. In Excel and Google Sheets, =LOWER(A1) turns the text in A1 into lowercase and =PROPER(A1) capitalizes each word. For a sentence, a common trick is =UPPER(LEFT(A1,1))&LOWER(MID(A1,2,LEN(A1))), which capitalizes the first letter and lowercases the rest. The article on UPPER, LOWER and PROPER in these programs explains the details and the problems with names.

In code, use the string functions of your language, but check the locale. Python has lower() and capitalize(), JavaScript has toLowerCase(), and SQL has LOWER(). In all of them, a conversion for identifiers should not depend on the user's language.

Check your result

After you fix the capitals, read the text once. The usual leftovers are proper nouns, acronyms, the first word after a quotation mark and words that were meant to be in capitals. If you are working with a name list, check surnames with prefixes such as McDonald, van der Berg and O'Brien, which no simple tool can predict. The article on capitalizing names explains why.

When the text is for a client, a school or the public, run a spelling check after the conversion. And if the text came from someone else, remember that the original capitals may have been intentional: product names and legal terms are sometimes written in capitals on purpose.