How to Easily Capitalize Text in Excel

Capitalizing text in Excel can seem tricky but it doesn’t have to be. With just a few simple steps you can capitalize words, sentences, or entire columns in your Excel spreadsheets. Whether you need to format text for consistency, make text stand out, or capitalize proper nouns, Excel provides several straightforward methods to change case.

In this comprehensive guide, we’ll cover the various ways to capitalize text in Excel, including using Excel functions, keyboard shortcuts, and Find & Replace. Read on to learn how to make text all UPPERCASE, lowercase, or Proper Case with just a few clicks.

Why Capitalize Text in Excel?

There are a few key reasons you may want to change case in Excel

• Consistency – Often data is entered inconsistently in spreadsheets. Capitalizing text makes it uniform. For example, you can capitalize headers or product names.

• Emphasis – Capital letters stand out visually Capitalizing a word or phrase puts emphasis on it

• Proper nouns – Names and places should be capitalized properly. This improves readability.

• Presentation – Capitalization can improve the aesthetics of reports and dashboards.

4 Easy Ways to Capitalize in Excel

Excel provides various straightforward methods for changing text case:

1. Excel’s UPPER, LOWER, and PROPER functions

2. The Change Case feature

3. Find & Replace tool

4. Keyboard shortcuts

Let’s look at each of these options in more detail:

1. Use Excel Text Functions

Excel includes three functions specifically for modifying text case:

• UPPER() – Converts all letters to uppercase
• LOWER() – Converts all letters to lowercase
• PROPER() – Capitalizes the first letter of each word

The UPPER and LOWER functions are useful for uniformly capitalizing or decapitalizing text.

PROPER case is ideal for capitalizing proper nouns where each word starts with a capital letter (e.g. name, city).

Here is the basic syntax for these Excel case functions:

=UPPER(text)=LOWER(text) =PROPER(text)

Where “text” is the text string, cell reference, or column you want to capitalize.

For example, to capitalize text in cell A1, use:

=UPPER(A1)

Or to proper case text:

=PROPER(A1)

You can apply these formulas across an entire column to quickly capitalize it.

2. Use the Change Case Tool

Excel’s Change Case tool allows you to easily cycle between sentence case, lowercase, uppercase, proper case, and back to original case.

Here’s how to use it:

1. Select the cell(s) or text you want to capitalize.

2. Go to the Home tab.

3. Click the Change Case icon in the Font group.

4. Select the desired capitalization option.

This will instantly change the case. Click the icon again to cycle through the different cases.

3. Find & Replace Text Case

Excel’s Find & Replace tool lets you capitalize text by replacing it with a differently cased version.

For example, you can find all instances of “excel” and replace it with “EXCEL”.

Here’s how to do it:

1. Press Ctrl + H to open the Find & Replace dialog box.

2. In the Find field, enter the text to find.

3. In the Replace field, type the capitalized text.

4. Click the Replace All button.

This will replace all occurrences with the new capitalized text.

4. Use Keyboard Shortcuts

A few keyboard shortcuts allow you to quickly change case:

• Ctrl + Shift + A – Capitalizes all letters (UPPERCASE)
• Ctrl + U – Lowercases all letters (lowercase)
• Shift + F3 – Toggles between lowercase, uppercase, and proper case

Select the text you want to capitalize first, then use the shortcuts to instantly change case.

Tips for Capitalizing Effectively in Excel

Follow these tips when capitalizing text in Excel:

• Be consistent with capitalization. Avoid mixing cases.

• Only capitalize the first word and proper nouns in titles and headers.

• Don’t overdo it. Too much capitalization reduces readability.

• Double check proper nouns are capitalized correctly.

• Use proper case for names and sentence case for sentences.

• Make key data stand out by capitalizing it. But don’t capitalize entire columns.

• Test different cases and choose what looks best for your purpose.

FAQs about Capitalizing Text in Excel

Here are answers to some frequently asked questions about capitalizing text in Excel:

How do I proper case a column in Excel?

Use the PROPER() function. For example, if your data is in column A, enter this formula in B1:

=PROPER(A1)

Then copy the formula down column B to proper case the entire column.

How do I change Excel text to uppercase?

To capitalize an entire column, use the UPPER() function. For data in column A, use this formula in B1:

=UPPER(A1)

Copy down column B to make all text uppercase.

Can you change case in Excel without formulas?

Yes, you can use the Change Case button on the Home tab or keyboard shortcuts without using formulas.

How do I lowercase just the first letter in Excel?

Use the LEFT() and LOWER() functions together. For example, to lowercase just the first letter of text in cell A1:

=LEFT(LOWER(A1),1)&RIGHT(A1,LEN(A1)-1)

This lowercases the first letter and keeps the rest of the text as is.

Get More Out of Excel Text Tools

As you can see, it’s quick and easy to capitalize columns, cells, names, headers, and more in Excel.

The key options include text case functions, Find & Replace, Change Case button, and keyboard shortcuts.

Capitalizing text properly helps make your spreadsheets look more polished and professional. It improves readability and puts emphasis on important terms.

Excel has many other useful text and string functions beyond changing case. To get the most out of Excel’s text manipulation capabilities, check out the:

• TRIM and CLEAN functions to remove extra spaces and non-printable characters

• FIND and SEARCH tools to locate text within cells

• LEFT and RIGHT functions to extract substrings

• LEN function to get text string lengths

• REPLACE and SUBSTITUTE to replace or remove substrings

Mastering Excel’s text features will help you better wrangle, format, and transform string data in your spreadsheets. So don’t hesitate to capitalize on these functions! With a bit of practice, you’ll be capitalizing text with ease.

Frequency of Entities:

howtogeek.com: 2
ablebits.com: 2
excel: 37
text: 24
capitalize: 14
capitalizing: 7
case: 15
uppercase: 5
lowercase: 5
proper: 7
column: 6
function: 6
letters: 4