I transcribe legal briefings on a daily basis. I’ve decided to stop using Microsoft Word and use Pages because it’s faster and more elegant. Everything has been going great, except for one missing feature from Pages: the “change case” function. I used to use this all the time to quickly change the case of words and sentences, but now I have to do it by hand.

Just to sidetrack off your question for a moment, you mentioned that you take transcriptions every day. Pages and Word may not be the best tools for your job, so you may want to check out a dedicated transcription program like Transcriva 2 ($30, bartastechnologies.com). Transcriva has features specifically designed for the professional transcriber, and it can export your transcriptions in a variety of formats that both Pages and Word can import.

Now, to get back to your question about the missing “change case” feature in Pages. Pages does offer a few basic capitalization features under the Format > Font > Capitalization menu, but it’s missing some of the more useful options like lowercase and sentence case.

If you spend a lot of time working with text, WordService is an indispensable batch of services.

We recommend installing WordService (free, devon-technologies.com/products/freeware/services.html), a free Mac OS X service that provides 34 functions to clean up, convert, and reformat the selected text in your documents. It includes most of the missing case functions from Microsoft Word, along with a bunch of other nifty text tricks.

As an added bonus, since WordService is integrated into Mac OS X as a service, it’s available in any text-editing app that you use on your Mac (including popular apps like TextEdit and Mail), and you can assign your own keyboard shortcuts to the different functions using your Keyboard System Preference.

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