Shift+F3: change letter case without retyping

Retyping text just to fix its letter case is wasted work. It happens easily — Caps Lock stays on and you type an entire paragraph in ALL CAPS, or the other way around, you need to turn regular text into a heading with capitalized first letters. Deleting and retyping whole sentences over this isn't necessary.

A typical scenario

You're typing quickly and don't notice Caps Lock is on — suddenly an entire paragraph is written in ALL CAPS. The usual reaction is to select the text, delete it, and retype it with Caps Lock off, which for a longer passage means retyping whole paragraphs just because of letter case, not content.

With Shift + F3, you just select the mistyped text and press the shortcut — Word (and other apps that support it) switches the letter case without having to delete or retype anything. Press it repeatedly to cycle through three variants until you find the right one.

How to do it

1. Select the text whose letter case you want to change — it can be a single word, a sentence, or an entire paragraph.
2. Press Shift + F3. The text switches to the first variant in the cycle, usually all lowercase.
3. Press Shift + F3 again — the text switches to the variant with the first letter of each sentence capitalized.
4. Press Shift + F3 a third time — the text switches to ALL CAPS throughout.
5. Pressing it again cycles back to the first variant, so you can pick whichever one you need at any point, with no risk of "overshooting" and having to start over.

The best tools

• Shift + F3 in Word — a free built-in shortcut, works instantly on selected text with no setup needed.
• UPPER, LOWER, and PROPER functions in Excel — a similar idea for changing letter case in spreadsheet cells, just achieved through a formula instead.
• Google Docs (extensions and add-ons) — Google Docs doesn't have the same built-in shortcut, but offers a similar feature through add-ons from its gallery.
• Text editors with text-transform support (Notepad++, VS Code) — for developers and technically savvy users who need to change letter case outside of Word too.

What you get out of it

• Time: roughly 2–3 minutes a week saved on retyping text whenever Caps Lock gets switched on by accident, or when you need to quickly adjust a heading.
• Content preserved: the text stays exactly the same — only its case changes, with no risk of a typo from retyping.
• Speed: one to three key presses instead of deleting and typing from scratch.
• Less frustration: a small annoyance like accidental Caps Lock is fixed in seconds, without breaking your writing flow.

Pro tip

The shortcut also works on individual words in the middle of a sentence — if you only need to fix the case of one word (say, a product name or an abbreviation), select just that word, and the shortcut applies only to that part of the text, leaving the rest of the sentence unchanged.