📌 Automatically Capitalize the First Letter of Each Word with the PROPER Function in Google Sheets

Have you ever had name, title, or address data in inconsistent letter cases?

• Convert “kim min su” → “Kim Min Su” for consistent name formatting
• Change “seoul national university” → “Seoul National University” for proper title style
• Unify customer data with mixed uppercase and lowercase letters

The PROPER function capitalizes the first letter of each word and converts the rest to lowercase. It’s useful in reports, customer lists, product names, and document titles to maintain a professional look.

✅ Function Overview

✅ Example 1: Standardize Name Formatting

=PROPER(A1)

📌 Result: Kim Min Su — Ideal for maintaining consistent customer name formats.

✅ Example 2: Apply Title Case to Product Names

=PROPER(B1)

📌 Result: Apple Macbook Pro 14 — Ensures neat, professional product listings.

✅ Example 3: Format Address Data

=PROPER(C1)

📌 Result: 123 Main Street, New York — Improves readability for mailing lists.

💡 Practical Tips

• Standardize names and addresses entered during sign-up
• Clean up names for email marketing lists
• Automatically format report and chart titles
• Fix letter case in imported data

⚠️ Caution

• PROPER capitalizes all words, including articles and prepositions (a, the, of, etc.)
• Acronyms (CEO, NASA) will be converted to lowercase
• Any letter after a number or special character will also be capitalized

✅ Summary

The PROPER function ensures clean, professional-looking text data across customer lists, product names, and reports. When combined with automation, it can process and standardize large datasets instantly.

Next post: REPT Function — Learn how to repeat characters or strings to create visual patterns or easily generate pattern-based data.