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New Feature: Extended Title Case (in StarterSet Plus)
PowerPoint's own Title Case feature is ... well ... stupid. It simply capitalizes the first letter of every word, even the articles and other little words that shouldn't be capitalized.
"Now Is The Time For" instead of "Now is the Time for"
StarterSet Plus does it better if you like. But you have to tell it to. Add the following to the [StarterSet] section of PPTools.INI (add a new [StarterSet] line if there isn't one already. Note that this feature is only available if you've purchased the inexpensive Plus upgrade to the free StarterSet.
If you're not sure how to edit PPTools.INI, see: How do I edit the StarterSet configuration file (PPTools.INI)?
Pardon us for letting the code below run out of its column, but this way you can simply select it, then copy/paste it into your PPTools.INI file.
ExtendedTitleCase=YES CapHyphenated=YES ; ; Do not title-case these words; you can add more words if you like. ; Separate words with vertical bars as below: TitleCaseIgnore=the|is|of|in|and|or|an|a|with|for|but ; ; You can also add special cases to suit your own needs. ; Use pairs Like/This, with pairs separated by vertical bars ; This means: Search for Like and replace with This ; So if you have a friend named O'Reilly, you'd use O'r/O'R to make sure the R stays capitalized in title case mode ; It also lets you keep OddlyCapitalized names properly capitalized ; And makes sure that an acronym like SOP stays capitalized TitleCaseSpecials=O'r/O'R|O's/O'S|Innercapped/InnerCapped|Sop/SOP
Save the file
If CapHyphenated is anything but blank, Cycle Case will capitalize the intial letter of both words in a hyphenated expression: Schleswig-Holstein for example.
A bit more about TitleCaseSpecials
How it works in practice ... after it's done with all the other Extended Title Case trickery, StarterSet splits the TitleCaseSpecials from PPTools.INI up into pairs like:
O'r/O'R Innercapped/InnerCapped Sop/SOP
It looks for any example of the first "word" in each pair and replaces it with the second "word". So for example if you had a sentence like
This process is SOP
and pressed the cycle case button several times, it'd become lowercased ("this process is sop") then uppercased ("THIS PROCESS IS SOP") and finally TitleCased ("This Process is Sop"). Wrong, in other words.
But when StarterSet does the TitleCaseSpecials replacements, it finds "Sop" and replaces it with "SOP" and all's well.
How and when do you enter new TitleCaseSpecials? Simple. If an acronym or other bit of text is consistently wrong, enter it (or as little of it as it takes to do the job, as we've done in the case of our friends O'Reilly and O'Sullivan above, for example ... just the O'R and O'S is enough).
Note that if you need acronyms like SOP to stay capitalized in text that's otherwise lowercased, you'll need to add
sop/SOP
to your TitleCaseSpecials as well.
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