Capitalizing Words Consistently and Appropriately

Use capital letters consistently and appropriately. Most technical documentation tends to overuse capital letters. Translators usually assume that capital letters indicate a program, a form, a table, a field, and so on. Use capitalization for:

• The first letter of the first word of a sentence.

• Acronyms.

• Headings and names of things.

• In headings, capitalize the first and last words and all other words except articles (the, a, an), conjunctions (and, or, but, and so on), and prepositions (in, to, on, from, and so on).

• Capitalize names of things, such as systems, programs, forms, tables, and fields. Always precede the name with the and follow it with what it is. For example, access the Speed Invoice Entry form not access Speed Invoice Entry.

• Capitalize names as they appear in the software, even if they do not follow the conventions for headings.

Do not capitalize terms when they are used in a generic sense, even if the same term might be used as a name and capitalized in some other context. For example, in the sentence Enter a pay code in the Pay Code field, the term pay code is capitalized only when it is the name of the field.

This is a list of terms that should be not capitalized when used generically:

• address book

• automatic accounting instructions

• category codes

• chart of accounts

• company constant

• detail area

• processing options

• user defined codes

• multicurrency

• general ledger