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: Changing Text Case Many Times.

Changing Text Case Many Times

Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated July 25, 2020)
This tip applies to Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and 2021

Word provides a shortcut for changing the capitalization of your text. You can quickly change between lowercase, uppercase, and initial caps (first letter only is capitalized). To do this, all you need to do is to select the text that you wish to alter, and then press Shift+F3. You can continue to press Shift+F3 until you are satisfied with how the text appears.

There may be times when you are working with a large document that you want to change the case of the words in all occurrences of a particular style. For instances, let's assume that you have a document that you wrote, in which heading level 3 was originally intended to be all uppercase. Now, however, you need to change it so that only the first letter of each word is uppercase (usually referred to as initial caps). The following macro will search for all occurrences of the Heading 3 style and change it to initial caps.

Sub ChangeTextCase()
    Selection.HomeKey Unit:=wdStory
    Selection.Find.ClearFormatting
    Selection.Find.Replacement.ClearFormatting
    Selection.Find.Style = ActiveDocument.Styles("Heading 3")
    Selection.Find.Execute
    While Selection.Find.Found
        Selection.Range.Case = wdTitleWord
        Selection.Find.Execute
    Wend
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 (13049) 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: Changing Text Case Many Times.

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 nine minus 1?

2021-04-17 18:01:30

John Mann

Why not simply change one occurence of the style in question (Heading 3 in the example), then redefine the style to that new format. That should cause all instances of the style to change to match the new definition.

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