Specifying Proper Case

Summary: If you need to change the case of letters in a cell, one of the functions you can use is the PROPER function. This tip describes how to use the function to alter the appearance of your text. (This tip works with Microsoft Excel 97, Excel 2000, Excel 2002, Excel 2003, and Excel 2007.)

If you receive information from others as an odd assortment of upper- and lowercase characters, you may want to put the PROPER worksheet function to work for you. This function converts text so that the first letters of any words are uppercase and everything else is lowercase. Actually, what it does is make everything lowercase except any letters that do not follow another letter. Thus, any letters following spaces, punctuation, or numbers would be converted to uppercase.

As an example, if cell D4 contains "THIS IS MY TEXT", you could use the following formula in cell E4:

=PROPER(D4)

The result is that cell E4 will contain "This Is My Text".

ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (2156) applies to Microsoft Excel versions: 97 | 2000 | 2002 | 2003 | 2007

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Specifying Proper Case