Monday 10 February 2014

SmartCaps

A Free Document Productivity Tool for Word

SmartCaps uppercases the first letter of the current word, leaving the cursor position unchanged and allowing typing to continue uninterrupted. Press it again and uppercases the previous word. It is a real time saver, allowing corrections to be made without breaking the flow of content entry.

In the following example, the M in project manager is capitalised when the shortcut key is pressed.







If invoked again, the Smart Caps function capitalises the previous word. Note that the P in project manager is now capitalised.









A similar function is available that lowercases words in the same way.



Further notes

Each successive use of the function capitalises each prior word until the beginning of the paragraph is reached.  The need to capitalised words in a prior paragraph is remote and it also means that the routine stops processing when the beginning of a table cell is reached.


"Case Changed" appears in the status bar if captialization has occurred, otherwise "Beginning of Paragraph" that further use is unnecessary.

When editing a document, place the cursor in the middle of a word and invoke SmartCaps to capitalise the current word.

If a range is selected, SmartCaps sets title case on the selected text.

Shortcut keyboard assignment

The shortcut keys are:
  • dpSmartCapsUppercase: Control+Numberpad+
  • dpSmartCapsLowercase: Control+Numberpad-
With a laptop keyboard, consider using the plus and minus keys in the number row of the keybard.  These keys adjust the font size and there are other ways to do this via the mouse.   See here for instructions on assigning keys.

Inspiration

I was inspired to prepare this Tool when working on a large legal contract with many defined terms which needed to be capitalised. It made me realise how much time I spent capitalising words and how distracting the process of doing so was.

The word equivalent for SmartCaps requires several keystrokes to select the word(s) and use the Change Case function.  The real problem is that the cursor position is not retained, and more clicks or shortcut keys are required to return to the original start point to resume typing.

I developed this tool to streamline the process and was surprised how quickly it became something I use daily.

Summary

SmartCaps is a simple but useful Tool removes a little friction in your day.

More details including how the SmartCaps works can be found each of the release documents in Downloads tab.

2 comments:

  1. Very nice! I use Shift-F3 regularly, so I wondered why I'd need this — until I got to the part about applying the initial cap to *preceding* words. Sometimes the simplest tools are the most useful.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks Eric - I often forget to capitalise things - I needed something simple to correct the problem and move on with the least impact.

      Delete

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