Change the Case of Text in PowerPoint Presentations

PowerPoint supports two different methods for changing the case of text that you've entered into your presentation. Depending on what's easiest for you, change the text case using shortcut keys on your keyboard or change the case using a command in the Font group of the Home tab.

Change Case Using Shortcut Keys

Keyboard shortcuts are useful for just about any program as a fast alternative to using the mouse. PowerPoint supports the Shift+F3 shortcut in Windows (which is the same in Word) to toggle between the three most common selections for changing text case:

• Uppercase: All of the letters in the selected text are capitalized.
• Lowercase: None of the letters in the selected text are capitalized.
• Capitalize each word: The first letter in each word of the selected text is capitalized.

Highlight the text to switch and press Shift+F3 to cycle between the settings.

Change Case Using the PowerPoint Ribbon

If you don't use keyboard shortcuts or use PowerPoint on a Mac, change the case of text in a presentation from the PowerPoint ribbon.

1. Select the text.

2. Go to Home and, in the Font group, select the Change Case (Aa) button.

3. Choose from these five options:

   1. Sentence case capitalizes the first letter in the selected sentence or bullet point.
   2. lowercase converts the selected text to lowercase, without exception.
   3. UPPERCASE converts the selected text to an all-caps setting. Numbers do not shift to punctuation symbols.
   4. Capitalize Each Word causes the first letter of each word in the selected text to be capitalized. (This isn't true title case, which doesn't capitalize conjunctions, articles, and prepositions of fewer than four letters.)
   5. tOGGLE cASE changes each letter of the selected text to the opposite of the current case. This is handy if you had inadvertently pressed the Caps Lock key while you were typing.

4. PowerPoint's case-changing tools are helpful but not foolproof. Using the sentence case converter does not preserve the formatting of proper nouns, and capitalize each word does exactly what it says, even if some words like a and of should remain lowercase in composition titles.

Considerations

The use of text case in PowerPoint presentations mixes a bit of art with a bit of science. Most people do not like all-caps text because it reminds them of shouting by email, but the limited and strategic use of all-caps headers can set text apart on a slide. 

In any presentation, the chief virtue is consistency. All the slides should use the same text formatting, typography, and spacing. Varying things too often among the slides confuses the visual presentation and appears both messy and amateurish. Rules of thumb for self-editing your slides include:

• Capitalize or punctuate all bullets or no bullets.
• If you render a slide's header in capitalize each word case, the case and punctuation of your bullets matter less than if you render your slide titles as short, complete sentences. Short-sentence titles usually look better with bullets presented as correctly formatted complete sentences.
• Avoid rendering long blocks of text in uppercase or capitalize each word case.