How to change text to uppercase, lowercase, or Title Case
✓ Verified in LibreOffice 25.8.7.3 ✓ Verified in Google Sheets (2026-08-30)Standardize capitalization — ALL CAPS, all lowercase, or Capitalize Each Word.
The formula
| App | Formula | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Excel (desktop) | =PROPER(A2) | UPPER(A2) = ALL CAPS; LOWER(A2) = all lowercase; PROPER(A2) = Title Case. |
| Google Sheets | =PROPER(A2) | Identical. |
| LibreOffice Calc | =PROPER(A2) | Identical. |
How it works
Three functions cover every case: UPPER makes everything capital, LOWER makes it all small, and PROPER capitalizes the first letter of each word — "aDA loVELACE" becomes "Ada Lovelace". PROPER is handy for cleaning imported names but it over-capitalizes things like "McDonald" (to "Mcdonald") and words after apostrophes, so check edge cases. For sentence case (only the first letter capital), there's no built-in — combine UPPER(LEFT(...)) with LOWER(MID(...)) (see the capitalize-the-first-letter-only recipe). These change the text itself; to only display differently while keeping the original, there's no format equivalent — case must be changed by formula.
Verified, not just documented
We ran =PROPER(A2) in LibreOffice 25.8.7.3 (headless, with forced recalculation) and it returned Ada Lovelace — exactly the expected result. We then ran the same formulas in Google Sheets, executed 2026-08-30: a formula-only workbook goes into Google Drive, which converts it to a Sheet and recalculates every formula with Google’s own engine, and comes back out as .xlsx carrying the values Google computed. It returned Ada Lovelace for the worked example, the same value LibreOffice produced. Both engines’ numbers on this page are executed results. The Excel formula follows Microsoft’s official documented syntax — we do not run desktop Excel.
Functions used
PROPER — see full Excel, Google Sheets & LibreOffice compatibility for each.