How to capitalize the first letter of each word (proper case)
✓ Verified in LibreOffice 25.8.7.3 ✓ Verified in Google Sheets (2026-08-30)Convert text to Title Case, capitalizing the first letter of every word.
The formula
| App | Formula | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Excel | =PROPER(A2) | UPPER() for ALL CAPS, LOWER() for all lowercase. |
| Google Sheets | =PROPER(A2) | Identical. |
| LibreOffice Calc | =PROPER(A2) | Identical. |
How it works
PROPER capitalizes the first letter of each word and lowercases the rest. 'john smith' becomes 'John Smith'. Note it also capitalizes after apostrophes and hyphens, so "o'brien" becomes "O'Brien".
Verified, not just documented
We ran =PROPER(A2) in LibreOffice 25.8.7.3 (headless, with forced recalculation) and it returned John Smith — 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 John Smith 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 Excel.
Functions used
PROPER — see full Excel, Google Sheets & LibreOffice compatibility for each.