Although I have been using a word-processor for many years now, and a manual typewriter for many before that, I do not possess great typing skills and so I still have to look at the keys rather than the screen as I type. I recently took one of these online 'Check Your Typing Speed' tests and I came in at a miserable 43 words per minute (wpm). To put this into perspective, an employer seeking a typist would be looking for 70 wpm or more, and the world record stands at a staggering 216 wpm.

You may think that this is no great hardship other than a lack of speed. But for those like me who watch the keyboard rather than the screen, there is the ultimate irritation of typing in the wrong case. Having just typed a long piece I glance up at the screen only to see that I have accidentally hit the Caps Lock key and what I have typed is completely unfit for purpose. It begins, 'oNCE UPON A TIME,' and continues in this manner until 'HAPPILY EVER AFTER'. I'm sure you have all done this at some point, but obviously for those who watch the screen as they type, the error will be noticed immediately and corrected.

But all is not lost. More recent versions of Word recognise this type of case calamity and correct it automatically. So if you start a sentence in lower case and then continue in capitals, Word will put you right. Indeed it took some effort to type that example above, as Word kept correcting me when I typed 'once' in that manner. However, if you type entirely in capitals then it will stand and, with a growl befitting a grizzly bear with gout, you set about highlighting the errant text in order to delete and start again in the correct case. But wait, for help is at hand.

You can automatically change the case of selected text by going to Format/Change Case, and clicking on the radio button you want. You can switch between lower and upper case and there are more options. You can also select sentence case, which capitalises the initial letter, and title case, which, as the title of this article demonstrates, capitalises the first letter of each word.

A great way of toggling through the different case options without the inconvenience of utilising the drop down menu is to use the keyboard. Select the passage of text you wish to change, and hold down shift, then press f3 to toggle between the case options as mentioned above.

As handy as this little tip is, it should not be used with careless abandon as a straightforward quick repair; you should always check for glitches. For example, if you have accidentally typed a sentence in capitals and you use the Shift/F3 to toggle it to lower case or sentence case, any capitalised acronyms within that sentence will also be converted back into lower case, so NASA will become nasa, and so on. Also you should check the preferred house style for any headlines that you type. This is a rather murky area where disagreement reigns, but when switching to title case, Word will capitalise the first letter of each word regardless. Some organisations, however, prefer to use lower case to start certain words in their titles. To show just how much variance there is in the composition of titles, the Chicago Manual of Style states that "articles (a, an, the), coordinating conjunctions (and, but, or, for, nor), and prepositions, regardless of length, are lowercased unless they are the first or last word of the title."

So while Word's title case will convert each word in the title to begin with a capital letter, as in The Wind In The Willows, some may prefer The Wind in the Willows. The key is to do your homework and be consistent.

Microsoft Word has many of these time-saving, problem solving gems hidden within its menus so unearthing them, perhaps through a training course, is a thoroughly worthwhile and informative step to take.