The above picture gives a very quick lesson in four different functions. Here’s what they do:

PROPER

Remember proper nouns from English class? Names of things, you know, stuff that deserves to start with a capital letter. This gives those words what they deserve. It’s particularly useful if you have a long list of names or address that have been entered in different ways, with all capitals, no capitals, or just plain shoddy capitalisation. This makes the first letter of each word a capital, and the rest lower case (of course it doesn’t work on words like XLCalibre (or McDonalds) where you need more than one capital).

UPPER

This makes all letters in the specified text upper case. It’s that simple.

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LOWER

Guess what this does – it makes it all lower case.

LEN

Just to throw you off guard, this tells you how many characters the text contains (LEN stands for length). XLCalibre is 9 characters long. Why is this useful? Well, the truth is on its not always that useful, but when combined with other functions it can be mighty handy. Trust me, if you’re going to learn more Excel functions you will want this in your repertoire.

So there you have it, an introduction to four text functions within the space of 5 minutes.