Capitalize Names Properly

Excel & Google Sheets

How it works

PROPER capitalizes the first letter of every word and lowercases the rest, so "ANA TORRES" and "ana torres" both become "Ana Torres". It treats anything that isn't a letter as a word boundary, which is exactly right for ordinary first-and-last names. It works identically in Excel and Google Sheets. The catch: names with internal capitals don't follow the one-capital-per-word rule — "McDonald" comes out as "Mcdonald" and "van der Berg" as "Van Der Berg" — so a small manual pass over unusual surnames is still wise.

PROPER(A2)

Capitalizes the first letter of each word in A2 and lowercases everything else.

When to use it

Use this after any import that arrives in the wrong case — CRM exports, badge-printer files, form submissions — before names appear in emails, letters, or printed reports. Combine with TRIM for a full name cleanup: =PROPER(TRIM(A2)).

Common mistakes

• ✕McDonald becomes Mcdonald and DiCaprio becomes Dicaprio.

  ✓PROPER only knows one capital per word, so internal capitals are lost — and O'BRIEN becomes O'Brien only because the apostrophe counts as a word break. Filter for names containing Mc, Mac, or Di and fix those few by hand.

• ✕Codes and acronyms in the same column get mangled.

  ✓PROPER turns "HR-2026-ID" into "Hr-2026-Id". Only apply it to columns that are purely names, not mixed text.

• ✕Editing the original column directly.

  ✓You can't wrap a cell in a formula in place. Add a helper column with =PROPER(A2), then copy it and Paste Special → Values over the original.