How To: Instantly Change Blocks of 'CAPITALIZED TEXT' in Microsoft Word to 'Lowercase Letters'

You know that moment when you finally figure out something, but you figured it out years after you really needed it? Don't you freaking hate that?!

Thanks to Reddit user josawalk, whom I hate, yet love, I now know how to change chunks of text from all capital letters to lowercase.

There were so many times in school when I needed to copy text from some PDF or a source like JSTOR and all of the letters were in uppercase!

SOMETIMES I SIMPLY FORGOT THAT CAPS LOCK WAS ON AND WOULD HAVE TO RETYPE THAT WHOLE SENTENCE.

If only I knew about this easy MS Word keyboard shortcut, I would've saved so much time and effort.

Note that this trick will work with most of the Office suite of apps, including Word, Outlook, Powerpoint, and Excel

How to Change Cases in Microsoft Word for Windows

If you're using MS Word on a Windows system, simply highlight the text and press:

• Shift + F3

Word will automatically lowercase everything first, and if you tap the shortcut again, it will take into account periods and capitalize the start of a sentence.

For example, it will start out looking like this:

Use the keyboard shortcut and you'll get all lowercase:

Then use the shortcut again to capitalize all of the first words of a sentence:

It's that easy, and I still can't believe I didn't know this trick.

Alternatively, you can go to the Home tab and click on the Change Case icon in the Font group to transform your highlighted text.

How to Change Cases in Word for Mac

If you have Word for Mac, then you're going to have one extra key to press for this shortcut. Since the function keys at the top of your keyboard are used for a bunch of other things by default (brightness, sound, keyboard light, etc.), you will need to press the fn key to actually utilize the function keys.

So in order to alter your case, highlight the text and press:

• Shift + fn + F3

Alternatively, you can highlight the text and go to Format -> Change Case and then select your preferred case style.

If you're using Pages on a Mac instead of Word, this trick won't work. In fact, there is no built-in way to do this exact thing. However, if you need to capitalize a block of text (don't know why you would), you can go to Format -> Font -> Capitalization and select All Caps to capitalize everything. Why don't they include an All Lowercase option? Who freaking knows.