Hi,
I need to clean up a quickbooks item list. The client wants everything in uppercase letters. I've tried a little google fo, but haven't been able to find out how I can get a keyboard shortcut to switch the selected text into all uppercase letters.

I really wish this was something in the font window in the invoice layout designer in quickbooks 2006.

Anyways, if anyone knows of something that would be great!

Changing text to uppercase is a specific thing that would have to be built-in to a specific piece of software.

If that isn't a feature built into Quickbooks already, there's nothing in Windows that will automatically do it for you, secret-keyboard-shortcut or not.

Your best option is to figure out a way to export the data into an editable file format, use a third party application to perform the transformation for you, and then re-import the data.

Second option, which is only a slight step above retyping everything manualy, is to copy (ctrl-C) each field out of quickbooks, paste (ctrl-V) into a third party application with the switch-to-caps feature, then Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V it back into quickbooks. Depending on the nature of the text, it may not be that much keystroke savings over just retyping.

By the way, many programmer's editing tools will have that feature (switching text to all caps). UltraEdit, for example, does this.

I don't know if Microsoft Word has that feature or not, although if not, you could definitely write a VBScript macro to do it.

If there's a significantly large amount of data to massage and this ends up being worth your time, you could write a custom program in VBScript that either ghosted keystrokes into the Quickbooks user interface and mangled the clipboard for you, or massaged the data in Quickbooks' files directly.

D'oh... I was hoping for some little smart application that would run in the background and handle the task.

Right now, I'm copying from an RDP window, pasting into local word, select all, shift+f3, cut, click rdp, paste...

some of the descriptions are a mile long, some are two words. I wish quickbooks would allow me to export in a readable manor.

A well-written AutoIt script should do the trick. See this thread for a bit of info on how to get the contents of the text control(s) you're interested in. Then you'd just use the StringUpper() function, and replace the control's text with that value.

Find a font editor, and molest one of your fonts so that the lower-case characters are duplicates of the upper-case ones?

Or just run it out to a ZX Printer, if you can still find the special paper

Peter

I second the recommendation for Auto-It if you can't export in a delimited format (tabs, pipes or commas for instance).

The delimited export and import would be by far the fastest with an almost instant transformation of all the text using Ultra Edit or TextPad as two examples.

Auto-It is pretty straight forward, especially if the controls you need to click through are named. I've used it to great effect for transforming and moving data between three programs and to and from two disk-based files. Powerful and intuitive. I wish it existed for Mac OS actually.

Depending on how savvy you are with basic programming logic, Auto-It may or may not save you a great deal of time. It may take you 30 minutes or more to write and test your automation script, so keep that in mind.

This app is extremely powerful, but might not be exactly what you're looking for.