Please Note: This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Word versions: 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and Word in Office 365. 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: Using Find and Replace to Change Text Case.
David wanted to find words with an initial capital letter and change the initial capital letter to lowercase. Using wildcards, he wrote a Find string that correctly found capitalized words. However, David was unable to figure out how to change the initial capital to lowercase. He thought of using a Replace string, but didn't know how to create one that would do that.
There is no way to do this in Word, at least not using Find and Replace by itself. The closest you can achieve is to create a macro that will use Find and Replace to step through all instances of your capitalized words and individually change the case of them.
You can, however, easily change the case of those letters by following these general steps:
Figure 1. The Find tab of the Find and Replace dialog box.
WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (12517) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and Word in Office 365. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Word here: Using Find and Replace to Change Text Case.
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2017-04-18 13:58:47
billy rainbow
The easy way i've found to accomplish this task involves two straight-forward steps:
1. Use the global change to change all the strings all at once to something unique, say "##uniquestring##", or something like that.
2. Use the global change to change all the unique strings at once to whatever i wanted them to be in the first place, capitalization added or removed as desired.
That's seemed to work for every version of Word i've used.
2017-04-18 11:25:03
Surendera M. Bhanot
Thank!!
It worked just fine for me, and this is an value addition to my skills!!
2016-03-18 17:13:38
Janice
Is there an option to search for a Initial cap words and generate a report from the findings?
2015-08-31 17:21:47
Jarman
Thank you for your tip to Find and Replace All by choosing Advanced Find, etc. I wasn't aware of the "Match Case" button when I was trying to replace over 50 words in a document that were capitalized and I didn't need them to be capitalized.
Thanks for your tip!
Jarman
2015-08-26 15:49:36
John Korchok
This doesn't actually work. Using Find as you've suggested highlights the text, but doesn't select it. If one of the found items has the cursor in it, that item will be affected by Shift + F3 and the rest will be dehihglighted. If the cursor is in some other text, it will not move to the found text, and Shift + F3 only affects the location where the cursor is.
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Please Note:
This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Word versions: 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and Word in Office 365. 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: 
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