Please Note: This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Excel versions: 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and 2021. If you are using an earlier version (Excel 2003 or earlier), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for earlier versions of Excel, click here: Specifying Proper Case.
Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated May 15, 2021)
This tip applies to Excel 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and 2021
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 (12046) applies to Microsoft Excel 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and 2021. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Excel here: Specifying Proper Case.
Professional Development Guidance! Four world-class developers offer start-to-finish guidance for building powerful, robust, and secure applications with Excel. The authors show how to consistently make the right design decisions and make the most of Excel's powerful features. Check out Professional Excel Development today!
If you need to determine the date of the last day in a month, it's hard to beat the flexibility of the EOMONTH function. ...
Discover MoreUsers of the most recent versions of Excel have four different ways available to combine values into strings. Even those ...
Discover MoreWant to return more than a value when doing a lookup? Here are a couple of ways to do it by adding an IF clause to your ...
Discover MoreFREE SERVICE: Get tips like this every week in ExcelTips, a free productivity newsletter. Enter your address and click "Subscribe."
2021-05-15 10:09:09
Willy Vanhaelen
If you want to change the case directly in the cell or a range, you can use this one-liner macro:
Sub MakeProper()
Selection = Evaluate("IF({1},PROPER(" & Selection.Address & "))")
End Sub
Of course you can replace PROPER with UPPER or LOWER and the macro will make the changes accordingly.
Got a version of Excel that uses the ribbon interface (Excel 2007 or later)? This site is for you! If you use an earlier version of Excel, visit our ExcelTips site focusing on the menu interface.
FREE SERVICE: Get tips like this every week in ExcelTips, a free productivity newsletter. Enter your address and click "Subscribe."
Copyright © 2025 Sharon Parq Associates, Inc.
Please Note:
This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Excel versions: 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and 2021. If you are using an earlier version (Excel 2003 or earlier), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for earlier versions of Excel, click here:
Comments