During Jamie Lucero’s computer seminar that I mentioned below, he gave a small but incredibly useful tip that very few of us had ever seen. In Microsoft Word, highlight some text and then press Shift+F3. The text will toggle between CAPS, no caps and Initial Caps. This prompted such a “wow” from the audience that we made Jamie run through it several times on the projector. It’s little moments like these that keep technology interesting!
Merci mille fois!
I have been looking for a way to do this for so long that I had convinced myself that it was impossible. I will be happy to save the time, but even happier to avoid the frustration.
-Jenn
What a wonderful little tip that I was unaware of! I’m going to start using it right away. Thanks so much for sharing this!!!
@Jill and Jenn: No problem! This was one of those “isn’t it wonderful that translators have each other” moments, as we all oohed and aahed as we watched the text go LIKE THIS and like this and Like This on the screen!
Very likely you already know, but just in case…
In all Office applications, if you double-click on the Format Painter you can then apply the same formatting to different parts of the same document. When you have finished, just press Esc to deselect.
I also find F4 very useful to repeat any action I’ve just carried out, e.g. all the settings I’ve changed/applied in a dialog. It’s quicker than using the Repeat button on the standard toolbar or the Ribbon in Office 2007.
Licia
PS The nice thing about Shift+F3 is that it also converts lowercase extended characters into uppercase ones, if needed, e.g. Italian è into È
I have known about this shortcut for years and I admit I am rather spoilt by the constant use of it. I have been looking for a way to extend it universally. True, Trados and Transit have it, but Excel, PPT and other don’t. I have found some near-solutions, but not a real and complete one. Perhaps somebody out there would know?
Antonin
Hello,
Another tip that I find more than useful for redondant words is:
Imagne that you have the word “Telecommunications” which is repeated a lot in your document, and as a human being you’d rather win some time by just typin something shorter, you just have to highlight it and press ALT+F3, you’ll be prompted for a shortcut let’s use “tel”, then whenever you write “tel” just press F3 tadaaaaa…
I hope it helped.
Best regards,
Hello,
I didn’t know about the ALT+ F3 . wHAT i USE INSTEAD when for example I leave caps lock on by mistake is ALT+o followed by e which gives me a menu which in addition to CAPS, no caps and Initial Caps includes “toggle” which simply reverses upper and lower case. It also has sentence case (only the first word’s initial capitalised) and simple letter spacing options. You can move between the radio buttons using the up/down arrows, before hitting enter.
If you leave caps lock on and then type in a word beginning with a capital (so it looks like this: fIRSTLY) wORD WILL AUTOMATICALLY TOGGLE and switch off your caps lock the first time you hit the space bar.
am I giving too much away?
HTH
Paul
Great tips. Did you know about F12 for “save as”?
Regards
Gina
Wow! Thanks for the tip.
Paul, there’s an overachiever in every crowd… This sounds like a great tip! OpenOffice has a similar feature that you can turn on or not, where it will correct two initial caps, LIke THis automatically. Thanks for your comment!
Thanks to all of you for your contributions. If I discover anything worth sharing, I`ll let you know.