One of my readers asked if there was a way to change upper case strings within parentheses to lower case. For example, (INHALED DEEPLY) to (inhaled deeply). It seems they had hundreds of them, so doing them one at a time wasn’t the most efficient use of their time.
I was able to come up with a wildcard find to identify them all, but I couldn’t come up with a replace that preserved the contents while changing the case. I fiddled around a bit trying to get a macro to work, but to no avail. Then I decided to ask my question on the Microsoft support forums, but before I did so, I did a quick search to see if an answer had already been given—and it had! (https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/all/search-and-replace-uppercase-to-lowercase/b2ed6ffa-4fe7-450d-a66c-7578811ce71f)
NOTE: As always, test on a copy of your document before you run this—you are making a global change that may target more than you want. For example, these will all get changed to lower case:
- upper case acronyms in parentheses
- anything inside parentheses that starts with a capital letter, such as proper nouns, whether in all upper case or not
- everything from the first upper case letter after an opening parenthesis to the first-found closing parenthesis, which might be some pages later if you forgot to close the parenthesis.
This is a brute force method and may have unintended consequences. If in doubt, click Find Next to check each instance before you make this global change.
Steps to achieve this:
- Press Ctrl+h to open the Find and Replace window.
- Click the Find tab (this is important).
- In the Find What field, type \(([A-Z]*)\)
- Click More and select the Use wildcards checkbox.
- Click Find In and select Main Document from the drop-down list.
- All matches are found and automatically selected. DO NOT click inside the document otherwise you will lose the selections.
- Go to the Home tab and click the Aa icon in the Font group and change the case to lower case. This will change the case of everything selected.
[Link last checked March 2022]