How to Change Uppercase to Lowercase (and Back)

To change uppercase to lowercase, select the text and press Shift+F3 in Microsoft Word, use Format > Text > Capitalization in Google Docs, or use the =LOWER() function in Excel. For text from anywhere else, paste it into the Case converter and pick the case you need.

Microsoft Word: Shift+F3

Select the text and press Shift+F3. Each press cycles through the options: all lowercase, ALL UPPERCASE and Capitalize Each Word. On a Mac, or on laptops where the F keys control volume and brightness, you may need to hold Fn as well.

For more options, use the Change Case button (Aa) on the Home tab. It also offers "Sentence case." and "tOGGLE cASE", which fixes text typed with Caps Lock on by accident.

Google Docs: the Format menu

Google Docs has no default keyboard shortcut for this. Select the text, then go to Format > Text > Capitalization and choose lowercase, UPPERCASE or Title Case. There is no sentence case option here; for that, use the Case converter.

Excel: LOWER, UPPER and PROPER

Excel changes case with formulas. If your text is in cell A2:

Formula	Result for "jOHN o'NEIL"
=LOWER(A2)	john o'neil
=UPPER(A2)	JOHN O'NEIL
=PROPER(A2)	John O'Neil

Two things to know:

1. The result is a formula that depends on A2. To keep only the text, copy the cells, then use Paste Special > Values.
2. PROPER capitalises every letter that follows a non-letter. That is right for "O'Neil" but wrong for "it's", which becomes "It'S". Check the result.

Title case vs sentence case

The two are often confused, and the difference matters for headings:

• Title Case capitalises the main words: "How to Write a Better Headline". Short words such as a, and, of, the or to usually stay lowercase unless they come first. Style guides disagree on the details, so follow the one your publication uses.
• Sentence case capitalises only the first word and proper nouns: "How to write a better headline". Many websites and apps use it because it reads more naturally.

When you convert to sentence case with a tool, everything else is lowercased first, including names. "Meeting in paris with anna" needs to be fixed by hand: no tool can know which words are names in every context.

camelCase and snake_case for developers

Programming languages and databases use their own conventions for names:

• camelCase: orderTotalAmount (common in JavaScript and Java variables)
• PascalCase: OrderTotalAmount (common for class names)
• snake_case: order_total_amount (common in Python and database columns)
• kebab-case: order-total-amount (common in CSS classes and URLs)

The Case converter splits text into words at spaces, punctuation and existing capital letters, so "Order total amount" and "orderTotalAmount" both become order_total_amount. Each line is converted separately, so you can convert a whole list at once. For web addresses, the Slug generator goes further: it lowercases a title, removes accents and punctuation and joins the words with hyphens.

Quick method with our tools

1. Paste your text into the Case converter.
2. Choose the case: UPPERCASE, lowercase, Title Case, Sentence case, camelCase, snake_case and more.
3. Copy the result.
4. If the text came from a PDF or email and has broken lines or odd spaces, run it through the Text cleaner first.
5. To check a length limit afterwards (a title tag or a form field), paste it into the Word counter.

Common mistakes

• Retyping the text instead of converting it: slower, and a common source of typos.
• Trusting sentence case with names: proper nouns and acronyms such as "NASA" or "PDF" will be lowercased.
• Leaving Excel formulas in place: if you delete the original column, the converted column breaks. Paste as values first.
• Writing whole paragraphs in capitals: text in all caps is harder to read and is often perceived as shouting. Keep it for short labels.