Change case still flakey

[Posterizer]

After all these years of living with a Change Case command that worked
only some of the time, I had hoped it would be fixed in the latest
version of Office. It's not.

For example Sentence Case never works to change something that is in
Title Case.

I don't use it often enough, so I don't recall which other ones do or
don't work, and I don't recall if they're consistent or if the ones that
work only do so intermittently.

Or am I just missing something in how these are supposed to be used?
Dennis

 

[macropod]

Hi Dennis,

They all seem to work OK from a 'sentence case' or 'lower case' base. So, if you're having trouble converting to 'all caps' or
'title case', try converting to either of those first.

 

[CyberTaz]

Hi Dennis -

I've seen some of the "unexpected" results you referred to, but really have
never considered it to be a bug. The variation seems to revolve around
differences in definition of what a particular case actually is with regard
to articles, prepositions, & certain other parts of speech consisting of
only 1 or 2 letters. For example - using the one you cite;

If the line reads as:
This Is In Title Case

the conversion to Sentence Case does exactly as expected.

OTOH, if the same text exists as:
This is in Title Case

no conversion takes place at all when Sentence Case is chosen.

As macropod suggested, sometimes it's necessary to make an initial
conversion to "standardize" the structure before making the final change.

Regards |:>)
Bob Jones
[MVP] Office:Mac

 

[Clive Huggan]

Hello Dennis,

In addition to what Bob said: take a look at page 156 ('Case format
limitations') in some notes on the way I use Word for the Mac, titled "Bend
Word to Your Will", which are available as a free download from the Word
MVPs' website (http://word.mvps.org/Mac/Bend/BendWordToYourWill.html).

[Note: "Bend Word to your will" is designed to be used electronically and
most subjects are self-contained dictionary-style entries. If you decide to
read more widely than the item I've referred to, it's important to read the
front end of the document -- especially pages 3 and 5 -- so you can select
some Word settings that will allow you to use the document effectively.]

Another instance when Word is too "smart" for its own good.

Cheers,

Clive Huggan
Canberra, Australia
(My time zone is 5-11 hours different from the Americas and Europe, so my
follow-on responses to those regions can be delayed)
====================================================

 

[Slipface]

If the line reads as:
This Is In Title Case

the conversion to Sentence Case does exactly as expected.

OTOH, if the same text exists as:
This is in Title Case

no conversion takes place at all when Sentence Case is chosen.

Aha! That's probably it. Most of the time the titles that I am
changing to sentence case do not capitalize "non-essential" words
(there's probably a technical term for that, but I don't know it )
So words like "the," "and" etc are not capitalized in these particular
titles.

As macropod suggested, sometimes it's necessary to make an initial
conversion to "standardize" the structure before making the final change.

Most excellent. Thanks, gang. Bummer Word can't be just a tad smarter
and make all letters except the first one lower-case--seems an easy
enough rule to implement. But I don't write software, so I can only
guess

thanks!
Dennis

 

[Slipface]

Hello Dennis,

In addition to what Bob said: take a look at page 156 ('Case format
limitations') in some notes on the way I use Word for the Mac, titled "Bend
Word to Your Will", which are available as a free download from the Word
MVPs' website (http://word.mvps.org/Mac/Bend/BendWordToYourWill.html).

Got it--thanks! (and I've followed the instructions on pg 5 and it's
working fine).

I like the cmd-opt-c trick. Wonder if it suffers the same quirk as
noted previously? Either way, it would make it easier to "standardize"
it to lowercase, as suggested, then to sentence case.

Cool.

Thanks again, gang--as always, you're right on top of things
Dennis