Uppercase to lowercase keyboard shortcut

Word and PowerPoint on Windows

1. Select the text. Ctrl+A selects everything.
2. Press Shift+F3. Each press switches to the next of lowercase, UPPERCASE and Capitalize Each Word.
3. Stop when you see the case you want. Ctrl+Z undoes the change.

Shift+F3 doesn't include sentence case or tOGGLE cASE. For those, use Home > Change Case.

If pressing F3 changes your screen brightness or volume instead, your keyboard's top row is set to media keys. Hold fn as well, or check your laptop maker's settings for the function keys.

Word and PowerPoint on a Mac

1. Select the text. ⌘+A selects everything.
2. Press fn+Shift+F3 until the case you want appears.
3. ⌘+Z undoes it.

The same Change Case menu is on the Home tab, with sentence case and toggle case as well.

Make your own shortcut on a Mac

Apple's list of Mac keyboard shortcuts has no shortcut for changing case. What macOS does let you do is give any menu command its own shortcut. Pages, for example, has Edit > Transformations, with options for all uppercase, all lowercase, or a capital at the start of each word. To put one of those on a key:

1. Open the app and look under Edit > Transformations. Note the exact name of the command you want.
2. Choose Apple menu > System Settings, click Keyboard in the sidebar, then click Keyboard Shortcuts.
3. Select App Shortcuts, click the + button and choose the app from the Application menu. Choose All Applications if you want the shortcut everywhere the command exists.
4. In Menu title, type the full menu path exactly as it appears, using -> between the levels, for example Edit->Transformations-> followed by the command's name.
5. Click in Keyboard shortcut, press a key combination that nothing else uses, then click Done.

Apple notes that a shortcut already used by another command won't work, so pick something unusual, such as Control and Option with a letter. Some apps don't allow custom shortcuts at all.

Apps with no shortcut

Plenty of places have no case command: web forms, email apps, chat apps, social media posts and Word for the web. Paste the text into the converter below, copy the lowercase or sentence case result and paste it back. It works the same on Windows, Mac and phones.

Excel formulas

Excel has no case shortcut and no Change Case button. Microsoft's method is a formula in a spare column: =LOWER(A2) for lowercase, =UPPER(A2) for capitals and =PROPER(A2) to capitalise each word. Fill it down, copy the column, paste it over the original with Paste > Values, then delete the spare column.

Text typed with Caps Lock on

If you typed with Caps Lock on and still pressed Shift for capitals, your text looks like "hELLO jANE". Lowercase would lose the capitals you meant. Instead, use tOGGLE cASE in Word's Change Case menu, or the iNVERSE result in the converter. Both flip every letter, so you get "Hello Jane", names included.