Your Accessibility Options hint gave me the clue I needed, thanks. What had
happened to me several times (and, I suspect with the many others who wrote
with similar concerns) was that pressed the shift key and then held it down
while I rethought what I wanted to type. This triggered the Accessibility
Options dialog box, but when I clicked on Modify Settings, the new dialog box
was underneath other open windows. Not realizing this, I tried to continue
with my work, but it was as if the shift key was permanently held down, and
also some weird sort of group select mode was on. I was able to recreate
this condition at will, but have still not figured out a way of escaping from
it short of rebooting. I think I have solved my problem by modifying the
settings so I can hold the shift key down as long as I want without these
weird and wonderful things happening, but I suggest that Microsoft may wish
to allow users to escape from this trap by some intuitive method such as the
escape key.

"Suzanne S. Barnhill" wrote:

Well, "the standard Microsoft Header 2" is a bit of a red herring since
there's no such style. I assume you mean Heading 2. Is this happening only
in the Heading 2 style or in any style? In just this document or in all of
Word? In Word only or in other apps? If the effect is general, it could be
that the Shift key is stuck or that you have somehow enabled Accessibility
Options.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
Word MVP FAQ site: http://word.mvps.org
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.

"John Blackwell" wrote in message
...
I absolutely did not press CtrlShftA, and the style I selected was the
standard Microsoft Header 2. Also, the shift effect included the fact
that
when I typed 12345 I got !@#$% which does not happen under allcaps. From
looking at other postings, I am not the only one getting these anomalous
results. That is why I tried to give you a complete description of the
circumstances in which these results occurred.

"Suzanne S. Barnhill" wrote:

Perhaps you enabled All Caps (Ctrl+Shift+A) or perhaps the style you
selected had All Caps formatting?

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
Word MVP FAQ site: http://word.mvps.org
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the
newsgroup so
all may benefit.

"John Blackwell" John wrote in
message
...
I think I know what he was asking, since the same thing seems to
happen
with
me quite frequently.

Just now, I was creating a new Word document. I had just finished
some
bulleted items, and wanted to start a new subject, so I chose a
'heading
2'
style, and began typing. Everything I typed appeared as if I were
holding
the
shift key down. Nothing I did reversed this unwanted effect.
Eventually,
I
was able to cut and paste the text I had written into a notepad file,
close
and reopen word, cut and paste everything back into Word, and reapply
the
formatting discarded by notepad. Was there a better solution?

"Ms_PC" wrote:

Have you got the Caps Lock key on? If you want one capital letter
at
the
beginning of a sentence or for names, you should switch the Caps
Lock
off,
and press and hold the key below it (it has an arrow on it and there
is
another key which does the same on the right side) then press the
letter
you
want as a capital . You can type everything in caps if you want as
this
can
be quicker than trying to type using the Shift Key to get odd
capitals
then
you can select the text and change it using the Format, Change-Case
options
where you can choose to change the text to sentence or Title Case.
Hope
this helps.

"vp" wrote: