Power Tools provides you with various utilities to speed up most of your daily tasks. Using this tool, you can fulfil a few main tasks in a spreadsheet: change case, replace special characters, and polish text.
Before you start
The Text tool cannot process dates. Cells formatted as dates will be ignored to avoid data corruption.
How to change case and replace characters in Google Sheets
Run the Text tool
- Go to Add-ons > Power Tools > Start in the Google Sheets menu:
- Enter the Text group:
- Click the Modify icon on the add-on sidebar:
- Select the range with your text and decide what to do with it.
Change case in Google Sheets
Open the Change case group to modify the text capitalization in the selected cells:
- Sentence case.
Make each sentence in all cells of the range start with a capital letter.
Note. The option doesn't lower other letters in cells in order not to corrupt possible names and abbreviations. To lower everything anyway, please apply the
lower case option first.
- Capitalize Each Word
Use this option whenever you want to make the first letter of every word in the selected cells capital.
Tip. To avoid corrupting any acronyms you may have, check the box to Ignore abbreviations.
-
lower case
Convert all values of interest to lowercase by picking this radio button.
- UPPER CASE
Use this option to transform all the words in the selected cells to uppercase.
- tOGGLE tEXT
Reverse the case of each letter in the selected range.
Tip. The last checkbox, Ignore formulas, makes the tool skip cells with formulas that your range may contain. Otherwise, they will be processed as well and replaced with values.
Once the option is chosen, click Run and the case will be changed.
Replace symbols
Use this accordion to get rid of all special characters without breaking your data. It will help you make all characters in the range of interest uniform:
After you choose what to replace, click Run and see the changes in the range of your choice.
Polish text
This group contains the most commonly used options to bring all text in your spreadsheet back to its normal readable form:
- To make sure no excess space has delved into your text, tick off Remove extra spaces.
- On the contrary, we may lack some spaces after commas, full stops, brackets, etc. Choose Add space after punctuation marks to return them to their place.
- Make the text in each cell begin with the capital letter while lowering others with the Sentence case option.
Check some or all boxes depending on what you need to normalize and press Run. The text in the selected range will be polished in no time.
Related pages
Responses
Is there a way to calculate the number of characters in a cell and add it to a number in a cell? For example, the value of 3 would be 3, but the value of 3UW would be 5. The value of URW would be 3, etc
Hello Ben,
Thank you for contacting us. As much as we'd like to help, we do not have a tool that could help you with your task at the moment. Sorry.
Is there a way to reverse name placement? For example,
Sargent,Kristin
I need it to look like Kristin Sargent
Thank you for your question, Sheli.
A couple of our add-ons will help you (both of them can be found in Power Tools):
Please let us know if you have any other questions.
Hi! Is there a way to customize the Replace symbols option? I wish to change ä to ä. Thanks!
Hi Marja,
To look for particular symbols and text strings and replace them all with others, please use another tool of ours designed for this purpose: Advanced Find and Replace.
With this add-on, you can find and replace all instances of the symbol on all sheets at once.
The text functions don't seem to be working for me. I have tried to use the change case (Capitalize each word) to clean up some survey data that I had, but after highlighting the cells and selecting "Run" nothing happened.
I am in a trial period and used a few of the deduplication functions successfully, but I don't know if I can decide on the value if some of the featured tools aren't working as expected.
Thank you for contacting us, Jimmy.
Please try to apply lower case to your data first. This was made intentionally in order not to corrupt any acronyms you may have.
You can also find the explanation in this section of the instructions above.
Is it possible to make it so that each time I write, each word will be capitalised by default? (as opposed to me having to select that cell and manually capitalise it with Power Tools).
Also, is it possible to make the text always centred by default? Sometimes when new cells are inserted/old cells are deleted/merged/unmerged, the text is aligned to the right.
Thank you for your interest in our product, Ehud.
I'm afraid it's technically impossible to keep our add-on running on the background applying the cases right away. You need to run it each time you need to capitalize cells. A quicker way to start the operation is from the Recent tools tab at the bottom of Power Tools.
As for centring, you need to select all new cells and apply the necessary alignment using the Google Sheets standard utility. Alternatively, you can use their Paint format tool to copy the formatting from one cell to other cells.
Hi,
Which option I can use to find duplicate numbers?
And how to remove them automatically?
Hi Hatem,
Thank you for contacting us.
If we understand your task correctly, our Remove Duplicates may be helpful. The add-ons allow you to remove duplicate rows, cells and compare 2 tables for duplicates. Just run Power Tools, go to the Dedupe and Compare section and choose the necessary add-on.
Currently, it's impossible to run our add-ons automatically. You need to run it each time you want to remove duplicates. However, our Remove Duplicate Rows contains scenarios that let you save the options you select most often and run them in a click. Depending on your task, you may find this feature helpful.
Feel free to contact us again if you have any other questions or need further assistance.