Adjusting Small Caps Text

Summary: If you use small caps text in a document, you know that there are several steps involved in properly formatting the text. These steps can be combined into a single macro that makes adjusting the text easier than ever before. (This tip works with Microsoft Word 97, Word 2000, Word 2002, Word 2003, and Word 2007.)

Small caps are a typographic convention in which no lowercase letters are used. Traditionally, the first letter of the word appears a bit larger than the rest of the letters in a word, even though all letters are uppercase. When you use the Small Caps character attribute, Word coverts the letters to their proper appearance.

To convert words properly to small caps, you need to go through several steps, as follows:

Select the current word (or group of words)
Make sure the first letter of each word is uppercase
Set the Small Caps character attribute

If you are using small caps text sparingly in a document, then these steps are rather quick and painless. However, if you are using it quite a bit, then repeatedly performing the steps can get tiresome. The following is a macro you can use to perform these steps automatically:

Sub MakeSmallCaps()
     If Selection.Type = wdSelectionIP Then
          Selection.MoveLeft Unit:=wdWord, Count:=1
          Selection.MoveRight Unit:=wdWord, Count:=1, Extend:=wdExtend
     End If
     Selection.Range.Case = wdTitleWord
     Selection.Font.SmallCaps = True
End Sub

Tip #271 applies to Microsoft Word versions: 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003 | 2007

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