Video: How to change text case in Excel

Learn several ways of changing case in Excel: a special add-in, standard functions, or Flash Fill.

See all the ways you can change case of the values in Excel spreadsheets. Besides a special add-in that allows you to capitalize the first character in each cell, update the selected records to uppercase, lowercase, or proper case, you can see the standard functions you can use, and learn how to employ Flash Fill in Excel for this purpose.

How to change case in Excel: video transcript

In this video you'll learn how to change the selected values to uppercase, lowercase, proper case, and how you can capitalize the first character in each cell.

Unlike Microsoft Word, Excel doesn't offer any toolbar icons that change the case of your values in a click. This is why we provided such tool in our Cell Cleaner add-in.

Use Cell Cleaner add-in

Once you install the add-in, you'll find the Change Case icon under Ablebits Utilities tab in Excel. Now you only need to select the cells that you want to update.

You can change lowercase to uppercase or the other way round, capitalize each word, or even each cell. Once you select the necessary option, you can choose to back up the worksheet, and click Change case. That's it!

Use Excel functions to change to lowercase, uppercase, or proper case

If you prefer to work with formulas, let's take a look at the functions you will need.

When you want to change lowercase to uppercase in Excel, add a helper column where you'll write your formula, and enter
=UPPER

Write the address of your first cell with a value in parenthesis. To quickly get this formula in all the cells below, select the cell and double-click the black plus sign you'll see in the bottom-right corner.

The function you need to use to convert capital letters to lowercase in Excel is:
=LOWER

Add the cell address the same way.

If you don't want the text in all caps or in lowercase, use
=PROPER with the cell address in your table in Excel to capitalize the first letter of each word.

To convert the formulas to values, you'll need to select and copy them, then choose to paste special, values only to get your text the way you need it.

Employ Flash Fill in Excel: capitalize the first letter in the entire column

There is one more standard way to change case in the latest versions of Excel. The trick is to use a helper column right next to the original one.

You will need to type the first couple of values the way you need them: that is to give Excel an example of the case you want to see. Then either press Ctrl +E, or go to Data and click Flash Fill. It should get the idea and fill the entire column with the case you need.

Well, now that we looked at the main ways you can change case in Excel, I should mention two more options. You can select and copy your records, paste them to Word and use the options for changing case that are available there. Once you apply uppercase or lowercase, copy the results back to your table in Excel. Knowing the shortcuts will make this process a lot faster.

Finally, you can also automate the task and use a VBA macro. The process is not as hard as it may sound, please take a look at our blog post that describes it in detail.

You can find a link to our Text Toolkik for Excel in the description to this video, feel free to use the coupon code Preview to get a 15% discount.

I hope you'll find these hints helpful. If you have any questions or particular tasks, please share them as comments.