Proper case names in Excel

I recently had a question from someone asking if there was a way to take a column of names in Excel that were in all upper-case and convert them to proper case. In Word, it’s just a menu option, but that feature doesn’t exist in Excel. However, you can get there with an Excel formula. Here’s how…

Here’s my list of names in Excel:

I place my cursor in cell B1, and type in =PROPER(A1). This means that it will take the contents of cell A1 and convert the text to proper case:

Once that’s done, I can click in another cell, and I see that cell B1 has the proper case version of cell A1:

To easily apply that to all the other cells in column B, just click the Fill Handle in the lower right corner of the cell, and drag it down as far as necessary. Now all the values in column A will show with proper case in column B: