How to Stop Google Docs from Automatically Capitalizing Words

It’s common for the first word of a sentence to be capitalized and if you’ve been typing regularly for years, you may find that it is simply a reflex at this point. But sometimes you need to keep a word in lowercase, which you may discover requires an extra step in Google Docs.

By default, Google Docs will capitalize the first word of a sentence automatically if you didn’t do it yourself. If the majority of your typing calls for that first letter to be lowercase, however, or if you would simply prefer to take care of that capitalization yourself, it is a setting that you can turn off in Google Docs.

How to Disable Automatic Capitalization in Google Docs

The steps in this article were performed in the desktop version of Google Chrome, but will also work in other desktop browsers as well.

Step 1: Sign into your Google Drive at https://drive.google.com and open a Google Docs file.

Step 2: Select the Tools tab at the top of the window.

select the tools tab

Step 3: Choose Preferences from the bottom of this menu.

open google docs preferences

Step 4: Check the box to the left of Automatically capitalize words to remove the check mark, then click the OK button at the bottom of the window.

how to stop automatically capitalizing words in google docs

Now that you know how to stop Google Docs from automatically capitalizing words, you can save yourself some time in editing if you had to remove that capitalization previously.

Need to adjust your document’s margins? Find out how to change margins in Google Docs if you need them to be smaller or larger than they currently are.

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