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PROPER / UPPER / LOWER

Text & cleanup

Fix inconsistent capitalization — turn jane DOE and ACME llc into clean, uniform case.

Difficulty

Beginner

Excel file

1What is it?

PROPER capitalizes the first letter of every word and lower-cases the rest; UPPER makes everything capitals; LOWER makes it all small. They're how you normalize a column typed by ten different people into one consistent case — names, cities, company fields — so the data looks intentional and groups cleanly. PROPER isn't perfect on edge cases (it will render "McDonald" as "Mcdonald" and "LLC" as "Llc"), so eyeball proper nouns and acronyms after.

2What it looks like

PROPER(text)

text: The string to re-case — a name, city, or company cell.

3When you use it

Normalize a name column so "jane DOE" becomes "Jane Doe".
UPPER a state or currency code column for a clean, uniform key.
LOWER an email column so addresses match regardless of how they were typed.

4See it in action

Change the inputs — the formula and result update live. Prefer the real thing? Download the Excel file and open it in Excel.

Normalize inconsistent capitals. Switch between PROPER, UPPER, and LOWER and edit the text.

=PROPER(B2)Jane Doe

	A	B	C
1	Field	Value	Result
2	Name	jane DOE	Jane Doe

The lime cell holds the formula — click it (or any cell) to see its contents in the bar above, just like Excel. Edit the blue cells to watch it recompute.

Name (B2)

Function

5Common errors

Wrong on namesPROPER mangles "McDonald" → "Mcdonald" or "LLC" → "Llc".

Fix: It only knows word boundaries, not names — fix known exceptions by hand or with SUBSTITUTE.

Numbers change lookThe cell holds numbers or dates, not text.

Fix: Case functions are for text; leave numeric cells to number formatting.

Still text afterYou need the cleaned value, not a formula.

Fix: Copy the result and Paste Values over the original — see the paste-values tip.

6Better functions & alternatives

TRIM — Clean spacing before (or after) re-casing, so the column is fully tidy.
SUBSTITUTE — Patch the proper-noun exceptions PROPER gets wrong.
Flash Fill — Ctrl+E can re-case by example when a formula is overkill for a one-off.

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