How To Check If The First Letter In A Specific Cell Is Capital In Excel?

When it comes to text in MS Excel, one of the most commonly required tasks is to capitalize the first letters in the cells if it contains names, tasks, products, places, or anything else. Unlike Microsoft Word, Excel does not offer the Change Case button, which allows the capitalization of texts.

Human errors, such as not capitalizing the relevant letters in the spreadsheet, are common when entering a lot of data. When this happens, one wonders how to quickly check whether a certain cell has a capital letter in the first letter. In this tutorial, we teach how to do that and more, rectify it in seconds.

Read on to find out how.

Method 1: Using The Proper Function

Capitalizing first letters in a cell in Excel is quite simple; just use the PROPER function to convert it. The PROPER function capitalizes the first character in a text string and, lower cases the remaining characters.

Follow the step to capitalize the first letters of the necessary cells.

Step 1 − Create a temporary column containing the text to be converted next to the column. Place it between Columns A and B by right-clicking on the column B header and selecting "Insert".

As you can see, the above table consists of names of customers in column A which are not capitalized properly.

Step 2 − To capitalize only the first letter of cell A2, enter the following formula in cell B2

Syntax formula to capitalize the first letter of a text string in cell A2: =PROPER(A2)

Step 3 − Press enter to see the change.

Step 4 − You can capitalize the rest of the names in cells A3 to A11 in one go by simply dragging down the lower right square from B2 to B11.

Step 5 − You can select and copy the new values in column B, then paste them into column A.

Select "Paste Special" from the right-click menu, and select "Values" from the drop-down menu. The purpose of this step is to paste only names without the underlying formulas so that any errors are removed. You can delete the temporary column after this step.

After following the steps, your table will look like this.

Method 2: Using The Replace-Upper Function

You can capitalize only the first letter of your values by combining the REPLACE function, the UPPER function, and the LEFT function. We show you how to use this formula in the following example.

Step 1 − Select or insert a temporary column next to the column whose first letter you want to capitalize. In this case, column D is for the values in column C.

Step 2 − Enter the mentioned formula in cell D2 and press enter.

=REPLACE(LOWER(C2),1,1,UPPER(LEFT(C2,1)))

Step 3 − You will see only the value's first letter "B" in C2 capitalize.

You can replicate the results for the rest of the values in column C by simply dragging down the square box in the bottom right corner.

Conclusion

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