The Formatting Interference
Google Docs is designed to be a helpful word processor, anticipating common typing errors. One of its most aggressive features is auto-capitalization. Whenever you type a word following a period, exclamation point, or question mark, Docs automatically capitalizes the first letter. While generally useful for standard prose, this is incredibly frustrating if you are drafting code snippets, writing poetry with specific stylistic casing, or typing out technical acronyms that require lowercase letters following punctuation. You are forced to constantly hit the backspace key to manually correct Google’s “corrections.”
Taking Control of Your Casing
To ensure your text appears exactly as you type it and stop Google Docs from automatically capitalizing the first word of every new sentence, you must disable the auto-capitalization feature within the preferences menu.
Open any Google Doc. Look at the menu bar running across the top of the screen and click on Tools. From the dropdown menu, select Preferences. A dialogue box will appear on your screen, defaulting to the “General” tab. Look down the list of checkbox options for one labelled Automatically capitalize words. Click the checkbox to completely uncheck it. Click the blue OK button at the bottom of the dialogue box to save your changes. From this point forward, Google Docs will respect your exact keystrokes; if you type a lowercase letter after a period, it will remain lowercase, giving you total control over the stylistic casing of your document.