How to capitalize all letters in Word, Excel, and other apps

Capitalization isn’t something you have to think much about. The first letter of a sentence gets capitalized, along with any proper nouns—and you write in all caps when you’re angry (or excited, depending on who you ask).

But when you go to write a long title and have to hold Shift for every first letter or when you write a few sentences without realizing caps lock was on, capitalization can suddenly get more frustrating and time-consuming.

Here’s how to automatically capitalize all letters in Word, Google Docs, and other text editors—and in thousands of other apps using Zapier’s Formatter tool.

Table of contents: 

How to capitalize all letters in Word

Here’s the easiest way to capitalize all letters or change the case of text in your Word document. 

1. Highlight the text you want to change.

2. In the Home tab of your ribbon, click the Change Case icon, which looks like a capital and lowercase Aa next to your font options.

3. Select the case you want: Sentence case., lowercase, UPPERCASE, Capitalize Each Word, or tOGGLE cASE. 

Alternatively, you can highlight the text and use Word’s keyboard shortcut: press shift + fn + F3 on Mac or Shift + F3 on Windows, and keep pressing F3 until your text changes into the desired case.

How to capitalize all letters in Google Docs

It’s just as easy to capitalize all letters in Google Docs—you just have to know where to find its version of the Change Case tool.  

1. Highlight the text you want to change. 

2. Click Format > Text > Capitalization.

3. Select the case you want: lowercase, UPPERCASE, or Title Case.

How to capitalize all letters in Excel

It’s a little more complicated in Excel—you’ll need to use functions to get the job done.

• =UPPER will capitalize all letters. 

• =LOWER will make the text lowercase. 

• =PROPER will turn your text into Title Case (where the first letter of every word is capitalized). 

In every case, you’ll need to enter the formula in another cell, and the reformatted text will appear in that cell or column. In the example below, =UPPER(A1:A3) in column F tells Excel to capitalize all the text in cells A1 to A3. To make the same text from column A all lowercase, you’d enter =LOWER(A1:A3). 

How to capitalize all text on macOS

Using a Mac? Lots of apps on your Mac already include macOS’s built-in spelling and grammar checks along with text transformations. Here’s how to access it in most Mac apps. 

1. Highlight the text you want to change.

2. Right-click your selection.

3. Click Transformations, if available, and select the case you want: 

   • Make Upper Case: This capitalizes all letters

   • Make Lower Case: This makes all your text lowercase

   • Capitalize: This turns your text into Title Case. 

If your right-click menu doesn’t include a Transformations option, there’s another workaround. Click the More Text Options icon, which looks like a gear, in the app’s font settings—that’s where Pages and other Apple apps put those same transformations. The only catch is that there’s no option to make your text all lowercase. 

How to capitalize all letters in Sublime Text

One of the most popular code and text editors Sublime Text (available on Mac, Windows, and Linux) also includes a capitalization tool.

1. Highlight the text you want to change.

2. Click Edit > Convert Case.

3. Select the case you want. In addition to the standard options, Sublime Text also includes snake_case (lowercase, with an underscore between each word) and kebab-case (lowercase, with a hyphen between each word).

How to capitalize all letters using a web app

Another option is to use a web app to format your text. There are a number of simple web apps that can swap your case for you.

• In TitleCase, type or paste in your text, and then choose the case you want to automatically convert your text to.

• In Convert Case (pictured below), type or paste in your text, then choose each of the case options you want. It’ll give you your text in all of those cases for a quick way to pick what looks best.

Automatically capitalize all letters with Zapier

These tips work great for changing your capitalization within an app, like if you want to convert caps to lowercase in an article you’re writing. But if you want to change capitalization as you send information from one app to the other, here’s how to automatically convert text case with Zapier.

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This article was originally published in September 2017 by Matthew Guay. The most recent update was in May 2024.