Excel VBA Uppercase, Lowercase and more

Ever received a spreadsheet and all the data on it is in the wrong case? You might received a dodgy dump of data from your website or database, or maybe the user-inputted data is poorly or inconsistently formatted. Here I’ll guide you through how to do Excel VBA Uppercase, lowercase and capitalising the first letter of a string. All these tasks are invaluable when you have to manipulate your data using VBA.

Excel VBA Uppercase

First, converting strings to upper case through Excel VBA: you need the Ucase function. Let’s say you want to loop through column A, replacing the current cell with an upper case version:

For i = 1 to cells(Rows.Count, 1)

     Cells(i,1) = Ucase(Cells(i,1))

Next i

And that’s how you do Excel VBA Uppercase.

Excel VBA Lowercase

Lower case couldn’t be simpler: the Lcase function. Here’s an example of converting a variable to lower case:

Dim empStatus As String

empStatus = "CONTRACT"

empStatus = Lcase(empStatus)

MsgBox empStatus

How do I capitalise the first letter in a cell (or string) ?

Excel VBA does not have a native way to do this; you could use some clumsy string manipulation methods but let’s lean on the Excel functionality: the Excel Proper function. You can summon any function from Excel using the Application.WorksheetFunction method.

Here’s an example, capitalising the first letter of every cell in column C:

For i = 1 to cells(Rows.Count, 3)

     Cells(i,3) = Application.WorksheetFunction.Proper(Cells(i,3))

Next i

Three quick ways to manipulate text strings using Excel VBA,