Cleaning imported data
UPPER, LOWER, and PROPER: standardize inconsistent text case
Convert SKUs to uppercase, email addresses to lowercase, and contact names to title case—while watching how PROPER capitalizes letters after hyphens and punctuation.
Three fields that follow different casing conventions
Imported web forms routinely mix lowercase product codes ("sku-04b"), mixed-case emails ("Sales@Arte-Soft.com"), and all-caps or lowercase names ("elena petrova").
| Raw input | Function | Normalized output |
|---|---|---|
| sku-04b (A2) | =UPPER(A2) | SKU-04B |
| Sales@Arte-Soft.com (A3) | =LOWER(A3) | sales@arte-soft.com |
| elena petrova (A4) | =PROPER(A4) | Elena Petrova |
Choose UPPER for codes and LOWER for emails
UPPER converts every letter to capitals while leaving digits and hyphens untouched ("SKU-04B"). Combine LOWER with TRIM—=LOWER(TRIM(A3))—to normalize email addresses before deduplicating or exporting.
Lowercase the full email only when your receiving system explicitly treats mailbox names as case-insensitive. The domain is case-insensitive, but the local part before @ can be case-sensitive; preserve the original address otherwise.
=UPPER(A2)Watch PROPER on acronyms and hyphenated codes
PROPER capitalizes the first letter of the string and any letter that follows a non-letter character (spaces, hyphens, apostrophes), while lowercasing the rest. That turns "elena petrova" into "Elena Petrova", but it also turns an acronym like "ISO-9001" into "Iso-9001"—keep product standards on UPPER instead.
=PROPER(A4)Try the example
Use the original values or change them to test your understanding.