Yes, you can lowercase capital letters

John Naranjo wrote to say that he has a number of old text documents that were typed in all capital letters, and asked if there is a way to convert them to a normal uppercase and lowercase sentence structure. Well, MSWord has an easy conversion feature.

Select any sentence in an MSWord document, and then press F3 while holding down Shift. Subsequent pressings of F3 will cause the sentence to change from all caps to all lowercase, to all lowercase with the first letter of each word capitalized, and to all lowercase with the first letter of the phrase capitalized.

WordPerfect offers these options when you select a phrase and go to Edit>Convert Case.

If you don't have MSWord or WordPerfect, the free OpenOffice suite offers similar options by going to Format>Change Case. Speaking of OpenOffice, I have been very favorably impressed with this free suite ( that has most of the same features as MSOffice, WordPerfect Office and MSWorks.

Users of OpenOffice can easily open files created in programs such as Word, Excel or Powerpoint by clicking on File>Open, choosing the appropriate program from the Files Of Type list, and then navigating to the target file.

Conversely, OpenOffice documents can be saved as MSOffice files, including saving them to a particular version (such as Word97 or ExcelXP).

OpenOffice also handles most graphic files, such as BMP and JPG, along with HTML files.

Speaking of opening a file in a program other than its original, Dave Silvestri said he had a Quattro spreadsheet that needed editing. When I asked if he had Excel, Dave said yes, so I explained that Quattro files (as well as Lotus 123 and MSWorks spreadsheet files) are compatible with Excel, using "Files Of Type" as explained above. This inter-compatibility applies to most files created with all up-to-date office suite programs.

Regarding a recent column on printing labels, George Roberts asked if there is a practical way to print just one label on a sheet. Yes, it's just a matter of placing your text in the upper-left cell on your Avery layout and printing accordingly. However, if you want to print subsequent labels, there is an inherent danger of the label sheet getting jammed in your printer because of the removed label(s) causing an uneven surface.

Nonetheless, I have no problem with this when I smooth out the used label area with my fingers and feed the sheet into my printer by itself. Once I have used all the labels in the top row, I turn the sheet around and feed it from the other end. However, the margin settings may be different than those set for feeding the sheet normally. I compensate for this by simply going to File>Page Setup and changing the Top Margin setting accordingly.

I have been asked if there is a simple way to change a picture's dimensions when printing from Irfanview. Yes: Go to Image>Resize/Resample, click on Inches, and set the appropriate width or height.



