Converting Capitol Letters to Lower Case Characters

While it is not a common thing, you may have experienced a swapping of Excel documents in which the sender chose to enter data, say names, in all capitol letters. This may not be your preferred way you wish to display the names. If you didn't know any better, you could be stuck with a lot of typing to convert the capitol letters to a combination of Upper and Lower case letters (ie. JOHN SMITH as John Smith). Depending on the length of the listing, this could become tedious and possible introduce typing errors into your data. There is another way. Why not let Excel do the conversion for you?

Consider this short list of names, all CAPS.

If you remembered the "proper" function, your work could be done for you.

Select a column of cells near the existing column with names in Caps.

Enter the "=proper()" function pointing to the cell address of the first name.

 

 

Then select this cell and drag through the corresponding cells lining up with the last name in the column.

You are preparing for a Fill Down process to keep from having to enter each function manually.

With the appropriate cells selected, you then apply the Fill Down technique.

 

The familar Edit + Fill + Down will do the trick!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now you should have all of your names in the "proper" order.

To replace the ALL-CAPS version, simply copy the new version to the old location using the familar Copy/Paste.

 

 

 

Select the appropriate cell to begin the "paste" process.

 

 

 

 

You need to use the Paste Special rather than the Paste since the cells you copied use the same location you plan to use for re-locating your work. You want the names without the function that refers to another cell.

(Note: you can try Copy/Paste to see what happens if you like.)

 

 

 

 

 

Choose the Values from the choices of ways to apply the Paste.

 

This will separate the cell content from the function that produced the new names to just the names in their new format.

 

 

 

 

When you finish, you should see two identical listings of names.

All that remains is to delete the names in Column C and you have converted your ALL CAP text to its proper form.

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