How to Change Case in Excel (Uppercase, Lowercase, Sentence Case)

Excel boasts plenty of text and cell formatting tools. It is the top spreadsheet application for organizing datasets in a tabular form. You can change the font and cell styles quickly without any prior experience.

Users can leverage simple formulas to convert the text values from a cell to uppercase, proper, and lowercase.

In this quick guide, let us learn various methods to change case in Excel. We will discuss the steps to turn words or sentences into lowercase, uppercase, and sentence case.

Click on the following links to jump to that particular section of the article as per your requirements:

How to capitalize all letters
How to make all letters lowercase
[Sentence Case] – How to change only the first letter of the sentence to uppercase
How to change the first letter of every word to uppercase

Download the Example Excel Sheet

Here is the Excel Sheet containing the datasets used to demonstrate various functions to change the case of words or sentences from the given cell. You can make a copy of it and follow me along as we move through this article.

Click Here To Download!

If you have your own Excel file ready with the required dataset, skip downloading the above file.

How To Capitalize All Letters In Excel

It is the most common scenario. Consider the following example where we have employee names in the first column.

How to change case in Excel - Lowercase, Uppercase, Sentence Case - Ultimate Guide

The names do not follow any fixed format.

Our task is to capitalize all the names using the built-in Excel function.

Explained: The UPPER Function in Excel

The UPPER function in Excel allows you to convert all lowercase letters in a text string to uppercase. It is a simple-to-use function with the following general syntax,

=UPPER(text)

Here, the argument “text” needs to be replaced with the text or cell reference holding the text string that you wish to capitalize.

Now, let’s look at the steps to use the UPPER function.

Select the desired cell
Type “=UPPER”
Choose the first option from the popup or press the “Tab” key
Replace the text argument with the cell reference “A2”
Complete the parenthesis using “)”
Press “Enter” on your keyboard

Our final formula should look like the following,

=UPPER(A2)

To apply this formula to the rest of the cells, follow the steps below,

Select the cell holding the formula
Hover to the Fill Handle on the lower-rightmost corner
You will observe a “+” icon
Double-click on it to fill in the formula for the rest of the cells

Excel will instantly capitalize the text string from the reference cell, as shown in the GIF.

How To Make All Letters Lowercase in Excel

In the above section, we learned to convert the text string to uppercase from the given cell.

Now, let us learn the steps to convert the exact text string to lowercase. To do that, we can use an Excel function called LOWER.

Explained: The LOWER Function in Excel

The LOWER function in Excel helps to convert all the capital letters from a given text string to lowercase. Here’s the general syntax for the function,

=LOWER(text)

The “text” argument needs to be replaced with the words or sentence that you wish to convert to lowercase. Note that you can either manually enter the text string or provide the cell reference.

Let’s consider the same example from the previous section.

Our task is to convert all the names to lowercase using the LOWER function in Excel.

Let’s begin,

Select the desired cell
Type “=LOWER”
Choose the first option from the popup or press the “Tab” key
For the text argument, let us put the cell reference “A2”
Close the bracket using “)”
Press “Enter” on your keyboard

Here’s how the final formula should look after following the steps above,

=LOWER(A2)

Now, let us use this formula on the rest of the cell using the steps below,

Click on the cell holding the formula
Go to the Fill Handle on the lower-rightmost corner of the cell
You will notice a “+” icon
Click on that “+” icon and drag it to the end of the table

As you can see in the above GIF, all the names are instantly converted to lowercase.

How To Change The First Letter Of The Sentence To Uppercase

Consider the table shown below, where the cells from the first column contain sentences in lowercase.

Let us convert the first letter of each sentence to uppercase. In other words, we will change the cell format to sentence case.

Here, we need to combine the UPPER function with the LEFT and RIGHT functions in Excel.

We will be creating the following formula. We are assuming that our sentence is available in the cell “A2” to make the formula.

=UPPER(LEFT(A2,1))&RIGHT(A2,LEN(A2)-1)

Note that the above formula is divided into two sections.

UPPER(LEFT(A2,1)) is used to separate and capitalize the first letter
RIGHT(A2,LEN(A2)-1) is there to extract all the letters of the sentence except the first one

To simplify things, we will divide the process into three steps based on the above components of the formula.

STEP #1 – Separate and capitalize the first letter of the sentence

In this step, we will use the UPPER and LEFT functions to separate and capitalize the first letter of the sentence.

Click on the desired cell
Type “=UPPER”
Select the first option from the popup or press the “Tab” key
Now, type “left” and select the first option from the popup
(As the LEFT is a function in Excel, whenever the user puts the equal symbol and types the keyword left, a popup is displayed)
Replace the Text argument of the LEFT function with the cell reference “A2”
Press “,” to move to the next argument
Type “1” in the place of the “number_of_characters” argument
Close the bracket for the LEFT function using “)”
Close the bracket for the UPPER function using “)”
Press the “Enter” key

Our final formula would be as follows,

=UPPER(LEFT(A2,1))

The above formula will return only the first letter of the sentence, as shown in the above GIF.

STEP #2 – Extract all the letters of the sentence except the first one

As seen in the image at the beginning, all letters of the sentence are in lowercase.

Let us exclude the first letter and extract the remaining ones from the sentence.

Select the desired cell
Type “=RIGHT”
Choose the first option from the popup or press the “Tab” key
Replace the Text argument with the cell reference “A2”
Press “,” to move to the next argument
Type “LEN” and choose the first option from the popup
(You will see a popup as shown in the above image. It is because the LEN is a function in Excel)
Replace the text argument of the LEN function with the cell reference “A2”
Complete the bracket for the LEN function using “)”
Type “-1”
Complete the bracket for the RIGHT function using “)”
Press the “Enter” key to see the result

Here’s how the final formula looks:

=RIGHT(A2,LEN(A2)-1)

As seen in the above GIF, the formula will return all the letters from cell A2 except the first letter.

STEP #3 – Connect the results obtained in the previous two steps

In this final step, we will combine the results obtained in the last two steps.

We extracted and converted the first letter to uppercase using the first step.

Then, in the second step, extract the entire text string from the given cell except the first letter.

To combine the results, we need to use the “&” operator in Excel.

Referring to the above table, we have used the first formula in the cell “B2” and the second formula in the cell “C2”.

Now, let us connect them:

Select the cell “D2”
Type “=”
Now, click on the cell “B2”
Put “&” after the cell reference B2
Next, click on the cell “C2”
Press “Enter” on your keyboard

This is the formula we will have:

=B2&C2

Note that instead of creating three separate columns, you can add only one column and use the following formula.

=UPPER(LEFT(A2,1))&RIGHT(A2,LEN(A2)-1)

It would give you the same results.

How To Change The First Letter Of Every Word To Uppercase

This is the final example of formatting the text string in Excel. Here, we will use the PROPER function in Excel to capitalize the first letter of every word from the given sentence.

Explained: The PROPER Function in Excel

This is another simple-to-use function for changing the case of words or sentences within the given cell.

Here’s the general syntax for the function,

=PROPER(text)

Replace the “text” argument by manually entering the sentence or providing the cell reference containing the text string.

The PROPER function converts the first character to the upper case and rests to the lower case. This function is beneficial when you have full names that contain a mix of uppercase and lowercase letters. Refer to the following image.

Our task is to convert the above names to make sure the initial letter of the first and last name will be in uppercase.

Let’s start,

Click on the desired cell
Type “=PROPER”
Select the first option from the popup or press the “Tab” key
Replace the text argument with the cell reference “A2”
Complete the bracket using “)”
Press “Enter” on your keyboard

The final formula is as follows:

=PROPER(A2)

Excel will instantly convert the first and last names as per the standard guidelines.

FAQs

Q. How can I access the UPPER, LOWER, and PROPER functions from the main menu in Excel?

There are two ways to access any function in Excel. In the first method, you can simply select the cell and type “=” followed by the function name.

Whereas for the second method, you need to follow the steps below,

Select the cell
Go to the main menu and click on the “Formulas” tab
In the “Function Library” group, click on “Text” to open a dropdown menu of text-related functions
From the dropdown, select UPPER, LOWER, and PROPER functions
After that, Excel will prompt you to input the values for its arguments, as shown below

This method allows you to access the functions from the main menu in Excel easily.

Q. What is the best way to apply the case-changing formula to an entire column?

We have already discussed the steps to apply a formula to an entire column using Fill Handle.

Apart from that, there is one more method to apply formulas to an entire column quickly. It works like a charm with all the case-changing formulas, including the UPPER, LOWER, and PROPER functions.

All you need to do is replace the cell reference with the range of cells. Consider the following table where we need to capitalize all the letters.

Here are the steps:

Select the desired cell
Type “=UPPER”
Choose the first option from the popup or press the “Tab” key
Replace the text argument of the UPPER function with the cell range as “A2:A10”
Complete the parenthesis using “)”
Press “Enter” on your keyboard

The final formula should be as follows:

=UPPER(A2:A10)

As shown in the above GIF, the UPPER function is applied to all of the cells from the selected range.

Conclusion: Change Case in Excel

Now, you have come to know how easy it is to format the text strings from the given cell. Excel is a beginner-friendly spreadsheet application that gets the job done quickly.

The summary of functions used to change cases in Excel is as follows: