Office

Almost all of the work I do during the day is in AutoCAD and everything is in capital letters. So the CAPS LOCK key is my friend. It can also be my sworn enemy as you might imagine. I do work in other programs, email, Word, Excel occasionally and when I start typing invariably the first letter is a small one and the rest of the sentence is big shiny capital ones.

When in Word it is not a real problem because a couple of menu clicks and you get a dialog box with a four options to suit the issue at hand. If I forget and leave the CAPS LOCK off in AutoCAD it too has a little menu option for selecting the correct capitalization for text. When in Excel though, I have to highlight, copy, open Word, paste, key press, key press, highlight, copy, close Word, back to Excel, paste or just delete and retype. Guess which one I use?

The email thing is the most frustrating. It’s Outlook. Its Microsoft Word pretty much with the same ribbon and almost all the same text formatting options, but no sentence case swapper thing. Really? So I have to revert to the Excel procedure and depending how far I’ve gotten in the email I have even done the 20-step copy-paste dance.

It is a pain and usually I muddle through mumbling to myself. But today it got to me (steroids, ya think?). I started crawling the web looking for a macro or something that would automatically take the CAPS LOCK key off anytime I started typing into an Outlook text area. Couldn’t find anything like that or didn’t use the right search term, but I did stumble on an older page on Online Tech Tips that was designed for Word, but actually still works in Office 365 Outlook.

aLL hAIL sHIFT f-3 → press 2 keys together
ALL HAIL SHIFT F-3 → press 2 keys together
all hail shift f-3 → press 2 keys together
All Hail Shift F-3 → It’s a June miracle.