Please Note: This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Word versions: 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and 2021. If you are using an earlier version (Word 2003 or earlier), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for earlier versions of Word, click here: Adjusting Small Caps Text.

Adjusting Small Caps Text

Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated December 28, 2023)
This tip applies to Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and 2021

Small caps are a typographic convention in which no lowercase letters are used. Traditionally, the first letter of the word appears a bit larger than the rest of the letters in a word, even though all letters are uppercase. When you use the Small Caps character attribute, Word coverts the letters to their proper appearance.

To convert words properly to small caps, you need to go through the following steps:

Select the current word (or group of words).
Right-click the selection made in step 1. Word displays a context menu.
Click Font from the available options. Word displays the Font dialog box. (See Figure 1.)

Figure 1. The Font tab of the Font dialog box.

Set the Small Caps character attribute.
Click OK to close the Font dialog box.

If you are using small caps text sparingly in a document, then these steps are rather quick and painless. However, if you are using it quite a bit, then repeatedly performing the steps can get tiresome. The following is a macro you can use to perform these steps automatically:

Sub MakeSmallCaps()
     If Selection.Type = wdSelectionIP Then
          Selection.MoveLeft Unit:=wdWord, Count:=1
          Selection.MoveRight Unit:=wdWord, Count:=1, Extend:=wdExtend
     End If
     Selection.Range.Case = wdTitleWord
     Selection.Font.SmallCaps = True
End Sub

Note:

If you would like to know how to use the macros described on this page (or on any other page on the WordTips sites), I've prepared a special page that includes helpful information. Click here to open that special page in a new browser tab.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (13061) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and 2021. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Word here: Adjusting Small Caps Text.

Author Bio

Allen Wyatt

With more than 50 non-fiction books and numerous magazine articles to his credit, Allen Wyatt is an internationally recognized author. He is president of Sharon Parq Associates, a computer and publishing services company. Learn more about Allen...

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What is 8 - 4?

2020-06-20 22:25:24

Yateen

This is fine but be aware that when Word replaces regular capital letters with small capital letters,
what it really does is to use regular capitals in smaller size---what typographers call fake small caps.
This is clear because those small caps are a bit lighter in colour; true small caps, on the other hand,
are of the same colour as the rest of the text. This is so because they are designed differently:
the shape is that of regular capitals but the strokes that make up the letter are as thick as lowercase letters
(not slightly thinner, as is the case with regular capitals).
Not all fonts come with true small capitals but many do.

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