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Properly Capitalize Excel Text With “Proper”

Today I was working on a huge Microsoft Excel spreadsheet that contained a column of law firm names. Most of these names were in all caps, instead of only capitalizing the first letter of each word and leaving the rest lowercase. I wanted them properly capitalized, so I struck out to find an easy way to do it.

Proper() to the rescue! Simply put, proper() converts text to its proper capitalization. All I had to do was something like “=proper(a1)” and the firm’s name was automatically converted to only having the first letter of each word capitalized. The only problem is that if A1 contains something that you want to keep all caps (such as PC, LLP, or III for a person’s name). The simple solution here is to use the proper() function and then do a quick search & replace for those values that should remain all caps.

In the end, proper() allowed me to convert 140+ firm names to proper capitalization in about a 30 seconds, instead of the 15 minutes it would have taken by manually re-typing them all. That’s a time saver, right?

[tags]legal andrew, microsoft excel, excel, proper, capitalization, caps[/tags]

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October 15, 2006 by Andrew Flusche

Comments

8 Responses to “Properly Capitalize Excel Text With “Proper””

Yoav Ezer
October 16th, 2006

Yep, that is cool
Andrew F
October 16th, 2006

Yoav,

I’m glad you liked the tip. Hopefully it will be useful for you in the future.

Take care,
Andrew
ads
January 8th, 2007

kick ass
Andrew K
April 7th, 2007

Great tip! Just what I was looking for too.
Andrew Flusche
April 7th, 2007

Andrew,

I’m glad the Excel tip helped you out. It’s amazing how something so simple can be elusive.

Thanks for commenting,
Andrew
Tim, UK
October 4th, 2007

Thanks for the tip.
michael in NE
January 9th, 2008

this will really help with future mailings, but i can’t manipulate my newly-transformed data. oh well, it’s still good to know!

michael
Andrew Flusche
January 9th, 2008

michael - I hope the tip does help you out!