How to Transform Your Text Case in Excel

Hopefully by now you’re getting the picture that editing individual cells within Excel is a timesuck, and should be avoided at all costs. This tutorial is no exception. When editing your cells to capitalize the first letter of specific entries -- or perhaps the whole thing -- it’s best left to Excel’s tools to automate the process, rather than picking through entries one by one.

Today we’re going to learn how to do just that.

1. Open an Excel workbook.In this case, I’m just going to use a new workbook, and add a set of dummy data (names) using all sorts of random cases, both capitalizing entire names, and just random letters.

2. Use the column to the right of column A (column B) to create a temporary column. You can delete this later, or use a blank column elsewhere on the page, if needed. You don’t need to move any of your existing data if it’s already in column B.

3. In cell B1, type the following: =PROPER(A1) and then press Enter.

4. Grab the little square in the bottom right of cell B1, and drag it down to the end of your data set. This will apply the formula to each of the cells in column A.

5. Now we’re going to select all of the names in that column, and press CTRL + C to copy.

6. Right click in cell A1 (or the appropriate area on your workbook), and click Paste Special > Values. This pastes just the names, and not the underlying formula that created them -- which you shouldn’t need at this point.