When ending a sentence with a date, such as, January 1,
2003, and then typing a period, how can I make the next
character a capital letter? AutoCorrect does this after
the period when typing a word, but not when a period is
placed after a number. Thank you.

"Rena" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:
> When ending a sentence with a date, such as, January 1,
> 2003, and then typing a period, how can I make the next
> character a capital letter? AutoCorrect does this after
> the period when typing a word, but not when a period is
> placed after a number. Thank you.


Hi Rena,

You can't. Word would have to do a thorough grammatical analysis to see if
the sentence ends after the dot, or if it's an ordinal number ("... the
2003. case of ...").
And it would have to do that in real time, as you type.

This kind of analysis takes a lot of computing power, and can't be done
today.

Regards,
Klaus

Rena,

Only by depressing the Shift key with the next character.

Suzanne Barnhill provides some background below:

Word automatically capitalizes the first word in each
numbered item because it's the beginning of a paragraph,
and the beginning of a paragraph must be the beginning of
a sentence, right? But users don't always want items in
numbered lists capitalized. There was a time when Word was
a little smarter about this, and if the previous numbered
item (or the introduction to the list) didn't end in a
period (if the introduction ended in a colon, say, or the
numbered items ended in commas or semicolons or no
punctuation), Word would leave the capitalization alone.
This worked for me, but some users must still have been
dissatisfied, and so MS "fixed" Word so that it *never*
autocorrects the letter after a number followed by a
period, even when it is not in a numbered list but in
running text. <sigh>

>-----Original Message-----
>When ending a sentence with a date, such as, January 1,
>2003, and then typing a period, how can I make the next
>character a capital letter? AutoCorrect does this after
>the period when typing a word, but not when a period is
>placed after a number. Thank you.
>.
>

Just realized that you don't use dots to denote ordinals in English.
Perhaps a native English speaker can come up with an excuse for MS?

;-) Klaus

That's just a ridiculous "innovation" by MS (and how Gates loves
"innovation" for its own sake). I have Word 97, and the AutoCorrect
works fine after a sentence ending in a number. Another of the many
reasons I've heard of in the newsgroups to stay with Word 97. It seems
to me that for each useful innovation in Word 2000 or 2002, there are
three or four ways in which Word got worse.

Larry