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In school, you were taught to use an uppercase letter at the start of a sentence as well as for proper nouns. But that was a while ago, and now the brain cells are a bit fuzzy. Lucky thing Excel has a way to help fix case, er Case, um, CASE — well, you know what we mean.
Three functions alter the case of text: UPPER, LOWER, and PROPER. All three functions take a single argument — the text that will have its case altered. Here are a few examples:
Formula
| Result
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=LOWER("The Cow Jumped Over The Moon")
| the cow jumped over the moon
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=UPPER("the cow jumped over the moon")
| THE COW JUMPED OVER THE MOON
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=PROPER("the cow jumped over the moon")
| The Cow Jumped Over The Moon
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Try this out:
1. Enter a sentence in a cell.
Any old sentence will do, but don't make any letters uppercase. For example, type "excel is groovy" or "computers give me a headache."
2. Position the cursor in an empty cell.
3. Enter =UPPER( to start the function.
4. Click the cell that has the sentence, or enter its address.
5. Type a ), and press Enter.
6. In another empty cell, enter =PROPER( to start the function.
7. Click the cell that has the sentence, or enter its address.
8. Type a ), and press Enter.
You should now have two cells that show the sentence with a case change. One cell has the sentence in uppercase; the other cell, in proper case.
 | Perhaps you noticed that there is another possibility that needs to be addressed. What about when just the first word needs to start with an uppercase letter, and the rest of the string is all lowercase? Some people refer to this as sentence case. You can create sentence case by using the UPPER, LEFT, RIGHT, and LEN functions. (LEN is short for length and returns the number of characters in the cell.) With the assumption that the text is in cell B10, here is how the formula looks: |
=UPPER(LEFT(B10,1)) & RIGHT(B10,LEN(B10)-1)
In a nutshell, the UPPER function is applied to the first letter, which is isolated with the help of the LEFT function. This result is concatenated with the remainder of the string. You know how much is left by using LEN to get the length of the whole string and using the RIGHT function to get all the characters from the right except one. This type of multiuse function work takes a bit of getting used to.
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