How do I replace all WOrds with FAlse SEcond LEtter Capitalization in lots of Word documents?

Question

I need to mass-correct large amounts of documents in German. I need to handle several hundred pages of text. I have written a macro to do mass find-and-replace operations on common spelling mistakes.

I need to find a way to correct the common typing ERror where the SEcond CHaracter is CApitalized ALthough it Should Not Be.

Is there a wild card search I can use to replace all occurrences of the mis-capitalized second character in a word with the lower-case counterpart?

Could this wildcard account for the fact that abbreviations should not be changed?

I suppose one could pull something like this off with RegEx. I'd also be willing to use a third party tool or an editor with this macro capability.

A web search did not do much good, I cannot seem to find the correct combination of search terms.

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Example:

• Before: This is a TExt with FAlse CApitalization. The company ABC should not be affected, nor should US. And: TGIF.
• After: This is a Text with False Capitalization. The company ABC should not be affected, nor should US. And: TGIF

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Excuse my frequent edits, but after some head-scratching and reading the Word manual I managed to create a wild card that would find a reasonably large subset of misspelled words.

<[A-Z][A-Z][a-z][a-z]

It will find words like CApital and SMall but not UPS or HBO (not affiliated). Unfortunately, the replace field does not handle Regex. I am still looking for a method that will replace the misbehaving word with the correct spelling.

Answer 1

The 3rd party tool called TextPipe (not affiliated) will let me do just what I need. I have managed to create a filtre after some tweaking. Beware, Windows only and nothing for the faint-of-heart (I haven't seen any GUI this ugly recently, and it's developer-oriented, so expect a steep learning curve). It is rather powerful, though.

I suppose something like this could also be pulled off for free with a VBA or RegEx script - of the sort:

1. Find all words that match these criteria
2. Convert all these words to uppercasefirst (uncapitalize them, after that recapitalize)

Feel free to disagree and provide a better solution or a freeware.

Answer 2

I'm not sure about the handling of acronyms but Word 2007 (and potentially earlier) has a way to cycle through the main types of capitalization.

Select a block of text then press Shift+F3

This will cycle through the following:

• First letter capitalized

• Every Word Capitalized

• all words lower case

As I mentioned I do not know how well this deals with acronyms though.