We typically think of working with numbers in Excel, but we frequently also work with words and letters. And as someone who often manipulates different types of data knows, words are never quite in the case we need them to be. What happens when words are written in all uppercase, when we need them to be lowercase?
Excel offers a quick and easy way to change case so you can easily change text to uppercase, lowercase, and proper case (where each word begins with a capital letter, and the rest of the letter are lowercase). Below is a brief overview of the UPPER, LOWER, and PROPER functions in Excel as well as examples of how to use these functions to change the case of any text values you encounter in Excel.
As the name implies, the UPPER function in Excel offers an easy way to change the case of text to complete uppercase. The UPPER function will capitalize every letter in its text argument.
=UPPER(text)The text argument is just any text that you want to change the case to uppercase. All letters in the argument will change to capital letters.
Just as the UPPER function changes text to uppercase, the LOWER function changes text to complete lowercase. The LOWER function will turn every letter in the text argument to lowercase.
=LOWER(text)The text argument is just any text that you want to change the case to lowercase. All letters in the text argument will change to lowercase.
The PROPER function in Excel capitalizes the first letter of each word and changes every other letter to lowercase, the way you would capitalize the spelling of a person's name. For example, the text "John C. Reilly" is written in proper case because the first letter of each word is upper, and the following letters in each word are lower.
=PROPER(text)The text argument is just any text that you want to change to proper case.
The following are some examples of using UPPER, LOWER, and PROPER to change the case of text in Excel. Each of these functions is very simple and takes only one argument.
| A | |
|---|---|
| 1 | wILL fErRelL |
| 2 | John C. Reilly |
| 3 | AMY ADAMS |
| 4 | sacha baron cohen |
To change the case of these names to uppercase, we would simply use the UPPER function.
=UPPER(A1)This formula would return the string of text "WILL FERRELL". If we drag this formula down the list we will get the values "JOHN C. REILLY", "AMY ADAMS", and "SACHA BARON COHEN". The text in cell A3 does not change because it was already all uppercase. Notice that UPPER does not affect punctuation, as in the period in "John C. Reilly". UPPER, LOWER, and PROPER only affect letters.
| A | |
|---|---|
| 1 | sTeVe CaRelL |
| 2 | CRAIG ROBINSON |
| 3 | Jenna Fischer |
| 4 | ed helms |
To change the case of these names to lowercase in Excel we can use the LOWER function.
=LOWER(A1)This formula would return the string of text "steve carell". Again, we can drag the formula down and apply the same logic to all the names in the list and we would get "craig robinson", "jenna fischer", and "ed helms". Again, notice that the text in A4 remains unchanged because it was already completely lowercase.
| A | |
|---|---|
| 1 | seth rogen |
| 2 | jAmEs FRaNcO |
| 3 | CRAIG ROBINSON |
| 4 | Danny McBride |
To change the case of this text to proper case, we use the PROPER function.
=PROPER(A1)The formula above would return "Seth Rogen". If we apply this formula to the rest of the names in the list we get "James Franco", "Craig Robinson", and "Danny Mcbride". Note that due to rare exceptions in capitalization rules, proper case may not always capitalize a name correctly, as in the case of "Danny McBride."