Capitalize First Letters in Google Sheets (Easy Formula)

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If you work with text data in Google Sheets, there are many useful text functions that can help you slice and dice the text data or modify it easily.

One of the common tasks that many people need to do is capitalize the first letter (alphabet) in Google Sheets.

In this tutorial, I will show you how to use simple formulas to capitalize first letters in Google Sheets.

How to Capitalize First Letters in Google Sheet

There could be two scenarios where you need to capitalize the words in Google Sheets:

  1. Capitalize the first letter of each word
  2. Capitalize only the first letter of the entire text string

Let’s see how to get each of these done.

Capitalize First Letter of Each Word

This one is easy as Excel Google Sheets has an inbuilt function to do exactly this.

It’s the PROPER function.

The PROPER function takes the text as the input (or the cell that has the text) and gives you the result where every word has the first letter capitalized and rest all are in lower case.

Suppose I have the dataset as shown below and I want to capitalize the first letter of each word.

Dataset where the first letter needs to be capitalized

Below is the formula that will capitalize the first letter of each word:

=PROPER(A2)

Proper formula to capitalize first letter of each word

Once you have got the desired result, you can copy and paste the result of the formula as values. This would ensure that the result doesn’t change in case you edit the original dataset or delete it.

Capitalize the First Letter of the Entire Text String

Another common case is when you want to capitalize the first letter of each word in a cell.

While there is no dedicated function in Google Sheets to do this, you can easily get this done with a combination of a couple of formulas.

Suppose you have the dataset as shown below:

Below is the formula that will capitalize the first letter of each word:

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

Formula to capitalize first letter of the first word

The above formula works by taking the first alphabet in the cell and capitalizing it. This is done using the combination of UPPER and LEFT functions.

The remaining part of the text is extracted using the RIGHT formula, which is then added to the capitalized first alphabet. This is done using the concatenate symbol (&).

In case you want to capitalize the first letter and at the same time also make sure that the rest of the text is in lower case, you can use the below formula:

=REPLACE(LOWER(A2),1,1,UPPER(LEFT(A2,1)))

The above formula uses the REPLACE function to replace the first letter with the capitalized version of itself and at the same time, everything else is turned into the lower case using the LOWER function.

So, in this tutorial, I covered how to make first letter capital in Google Sheet using some simple formulas.

I hope you found this tutorial useful.

You may also like the following Google Sheets tutorials:

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